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272 points abdisalan | 2 comments | | HN request time: 0s | source
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mvkel ◴[] No.42175730[source]
> time to run it after not touching it for 4 years

> Two hours of my life gone...

Two hours of work after 4 years sounds ... perfectly acceptable?

And it would have run perfectly right away if the node version was specified, so a good learning, too

This feels like making a mountain out of a mole hill

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fourseventy ◴[] No.42176305[source]
Sounds like you are way too used to the javascript ecosystem if you think getting an old project to build should take hours...
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Ameo ◴[] No.42176528[source]
What ecosystem are you comparing to?

Any C/C++ project with even mild complexity has a good chance of being extremely difficult to build due to either missing libraries that have to be installed manually, system incompatibilities, or compiler issues.

Python has like 28 competing package managers and install options, half of which are deprecated or incompatible. I can't even run `pip install` at all anymore on Debian.

Even Rust, which is usually great and has modern packaging and built-in dependency management, often has issues building old projects due to breaking changes to the compiler.

All this is to try to say that I don't think this is some problem unique to JS at all - but rather a side effect of complex interconnected systems that change often.

A big reason Docker and containers in general became so popular was because it makes this problem a lot less difficult by bundling much of the environment into the container, and Docker is very much agnostic to the language and ecosystem running inside it.

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1. ramon156 ◴[] No.42178164{3}[source]
Libraries in the project fixes this whole issue for C/C++. As for compiler issues, just run it with the same compiler. It really shouldn't take more than 20 mins of setup.
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2. lmm ◴[] No.42181244[source]
> Libraries in the project fixes this whole issue for C/C++.

Yeah, make sure no-one can ever fix your security vulnerabilities.

> As for compiler issues, just run it with the same compiler.

And when the same compiler doesn't exist for your new machine?

Freezing everything makes things easier in the short term, but much harder in the long term.