Is Lodash Really Dead? Where’s Lodash 5?

Contrary to some rumors Lodash is pretty much alive and is heading to the Lodash 5 release!

Lodash is one of these utility libraries for Javascript that make life easier. It’s used for a lot of developers to simplify handling objects and arrays.

It’s also a library that was caught unprepared like Moment.js. Without modularization it was dropped from some projects because every 1kB of fat is too much when you load 5MB of analytical tools.

I use Lodash sometimes because of it’s usefulness and find it helpful. So with a surprise I found this tweet by Daniel Roe:

You have to read it twice because just scanning the tweet makes you believe Lodash died.

In reality Daniel writes there are no tickets opened while he wrote that tweet.

But you can feel some resentment against Lodash from the tweet since it’s phrased in a way that suggests Lodash to die, I’ll explain it at the end of the article.

In a following tweet he clarifies that the lack of tickets may be a preparation for Lodash 5 release:

At this point you knew I had to research the topic further. Why we see such ambiguous tweet about the popular library?

Here’s what I found. There was a plan to release Lodash 5 in 2021.

However, now it’s 2023, and Lodash 5 is two years past the schedule. The list of changes in that release was significant with an emphasis on lowering the size and modularization, issues that were sinking Lodash in some teams.

So the roadmap was very well thought through and Lodash 5, when released, will be able to catch some breath and show again how really useful it is, if it didn’t already.

I don’t know why it’s behind schedule. But that happens sometimes. No big deal. No reason to dislike it.