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by halfmatthalfcat 952 days ago
How would a program running on Node 18 now not run in 10 years given the same lockfile on Node 18?
7 comments

It definitely won't run, but I can't tell you why. Nobody can tell you why, because everything in that ecosystem is such an immensely complicated & fragile mess that there's no telling what will break; anything's fair game. Random module pulled from NPM? Surprise build step that depends on a random combination of C libraries? People reflecting implementation details of other modules that get changed with a point release? Some world conflict somewhere evoking a blackout in libReplaceCommaWithUnderscore? I don't know, but I've spent too many days of my life debugging Node module installs on the latest version, I'm certain it won't be any easier in 10 years.
But we're not talking about installing the latest versions of your libraries. Otherwise, Go will definitely break after 10 years
Even with same lock file, modules that depend on native compilations will have problem with changing c compilers, libraries etc. Some libraries are fixed to minor version of node or node-gyp, so they won't compile with newer node. I had run into these issues both in both python and nodejs.
Yes I know, the situations I described would apply if you used libraries with the same version 10 years from now.

In the case of the "internal dependency" one, plenty of people regularly patch stuff in NPM and keep the same version number.

> How would a program running on Node 18 now not run in 10 years given the same lockfile on Node 18?

funny enough i have a simple but old app created with “create react app” that doesn’t run on anything other than node 16 and below.

Because node 18 will be EOL by then and you won't be using node 18. A Go 1.15 program will be working just fine on Go 1.41 in 10 years
Well, having a working Node 18 in 10 years might prove really difficult.

Recreating the whole outdated stack is often doable, but it's really time consuming and often feels more like archeology than Computer Science.

What you really want is strong backward compatibility so that Node "30" still manages to build projects from 10 years ago.

so, you do concede it won't work on whatever Node version is current then.

how confident are you that Node 18 will run on whatever platform you're using then? or will you be stuck on a 2023 OS image also? will all the deps be available? will the many layers of tooling still work? will they work on Node 18, or will you need to get Node 18 and Node 2033 running in the same space? etc etc.

it's already a nightmare running things a year or two apart in time in the Node world, I would guess in 2033 you'd need an entire frozen-in-amber VM image with all tooling also frozen in the same amber/.

I had to compile Node 14 for Mac Arm last week, because there was no V8 for it.

It actually worked, remarkably, but I wouldn’t trust it on production.

Software is either maintained or abandoned. There’s no “done”, as much as we want it to.

If OpenSSL pulls another one of their major api changes node 18 won’t even build anywhere outside of museums.