40 million weekly downloads. If you've used React Router, Formik, or a handful of other libraries you've probably never directly installed fast-equals, it's just quietly there, doing deep and shallow equality checks faster than the usual alternatives.
I ran it through Package Rating out of curiosity, expecting a good score given how widely it's trusted. What I didn't expect was just how clean it is across the board:
- Liveness: 100/100 - actively maintained, recent commits and releases.
- Security: 100/100 - zero known vulnerabilities, critical or high.
- Dependency health: 100/100 - minimal footprint.
- Versioning: 100/100 - clean semver discipline.
Four dimensions, perfect scores. The only thing pulling the overall number down to 95.21 is community health: 68/100. Not a bad score by any means, but the one place where a 40M-download utility doesn't quite match the "massive project" assumption you might make from the download count alone, a reminder that community signals (contributor count, issue responsiveness, discussion activity) measure something different from "is this safe to depend on," and a widely-used, single-maintainer utility can be excellent on the latter while scoring more modestly on the former.
That's actually a useful distinction. A huge download count tells you a package is popular. It doesn't tell you whether it's secure, whether it's still maintained, or whether its dependency tree is clean. fast-equals happens to be all three, and the score breaks that down instead of collapsing it into one number that would hide the one dimension actually worth knowing about.
Check any package's own breakdown: https://packagerating.com
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