[tjholowaychuk]

Global installs are fine IMO, what's not fine is lack of versioning. I would say for Node/NPM at least, the lack of global installs is a pretty big burden, you end up pulling in 500MB for a trivial application. The same versioning isolation could be provided globally without issues unless you're tampering with third-party code for some reason.

[knucklesandwich]

Yeah, it really depends on the language and build artifact characteristics, but I'm mostly speaking about my experience with haskell and C. Natively compiled languages tend to have more problems with this because the libraries themselves hold linker references to each other. Versioning isolation alone isn't enough to solve these cases, because you can end up needing multiple copies of the same version of a library to satisfy the needs of all installed packages (because of versioning incompatibilities of transitive dependencies in different libraries). There's an article series about fixing this (and other problems) with haskell's cabal, but the solution basically involves nix style sandboxing [1] [2].

[1]: https://www.well-typed.com/blog/2014/09/how-we-might-abolish...

[2]: https://www.well-typed.com/blog/2015/01/how-we-might-abolish...