Replace chalk dependency with a lighter alternative

[trivikr]

Is your feature request related to a problem? Please describe.

Recently, the Ecosystem Performance was formed to cleanup, speedup, levelup the JavaScript Ecosystem.
Socket Security team wrote a blog post about it https://socket.dev/blog/javascript-community-launches-e18e-initiative-to-improve-ecosystem-performance

On the e18e cleanup channel on Discord, multiple solutions are being discussed. One of them is to replace chalk with picocolors. I see that jscodeshift uses chalk

jscodeshift/package.json

Line 37 in 0994ad8

"chalk": "^4.1.2",

Describe the solution you'd like

Replace chalk with a lighter alternative, like picocolors.

[trivikr]

I created a similar feature request with jscodeshift devDependencies which uses chalk:

• jest [Feature]: Replace chalk dependency with a lighter alternative  jestjs/jest#15189
• eslint Change Request: replace chalk dependency with a lighter alternative eslint/eslint#18686

Babel already replaced chalk with picocolors in babel/babel#16359

[Daniel15]

What does "lighter" mean in this case? Could you please share the metrics being used?

[trivikr]

What does "lighter" mean in this case? Could you please share the metrics being used?

It usually means an alternative with a smaller size (install/publish/bundle).

The dependency chalk@4.x which jscodeshift uses has ~33 kB publish size and ~105 kB install size.

Screenshot

On other hand, picocolors has 5.03 kB install/publish size

Screenshot

The lighter alternatives sometimes come with performance benefits too.
The picocolors benchmarks state it's 2X faster than chalk in their README.