Names for require(‘child_process’)

2023/03/19

It’s not obvious, right? Because here’s this module with a wacky snake_case name in your codebase which is surrounded by otherwise camelCase things. Here’s what people assign it to.

child_process 0.3321;
childProcess 0.2675;
cp 0.2619;
child 0.0515;
child_process_1 0.0174;
proc 0.0147;
ChildProcess 0.0121;
process 0.0083;
data 0.0065;
Womb 0.0038;
exports 0.0036;
ch 0.0032;
s 0.0032;
_child_process 0.0031;
exec 0.0027;
cproc 0.0017;
r 0.0016;
n 0.0016;
cProcess 0.0015;
childprocess 0.0008;
Child 0.0005;
subprocess 0.0003;
p 0.0003;
ncp 0.0002;
cprocess 0.0001

From a search for \w+\s*=\s*require$['"]child_process['"]$(;|$) count:2000 on Sourcegraph, weighted by repository stars. For example, if a repository had 12 stars and had three matches in the search results, twice with child_process = ... and once with cp = ..., it would contribute 8 votes for child_process and 4 votes for cp.

I realized afterwards that people could be doing require('node:child_process') now, but I had to load the search results manually, and I don’t want to do that again.

Here’s some other data that I also collected from the same search results.

const 0.7311;
var 0.2313;
(nothing) 0.0321;
let 0.0055

Presence of var or const or let on the line where the match occurs. That little green slice at the top is let.

";" 1;
(nothing) 0

Presence of ; at the end of the match. I double checked, and the query can match no-semicolon lines, and such results exist, only they didn’t include any.

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