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The tragedy of running an old Node project

(abdisalan.com)
272 points abdisalan | 2 comments | 18 Nov 24 18:24 UTC | HN request time: 0.938s | source
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mvkel ◴[18 Nov 24 19:03 UTC] 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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jonathanlydall ◴[19 Nov 24 12:09 UTC] No.42182564[source]▶
C# devs can open decade+ old solutions without issues, maybe this is just "normal" for the JavaScript ecosystem, but there absolutely exist other ecosystems which don't absolutely waste your time in this way.
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me551ah ◴[19 Nov 24 14:04 UTC] No.42183534[source]▶
Not true for the entire C# ecosystem. I tried rebooting a Xamarin project I coded a couple of years ago. Had to spend weeks upgrading it cause Microsoft decided to discontinue Xamarin and force everyone to use NET MAUI
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neonsunset ◴[19 Nov 24 14:12 UTC] No.42183621[source]▶
This has to do with specific framework and does not translate to the overall experience (for example targeting iOS is pain because Apple deprecates versions quickly, so downstream dependencies have to match this too).

You can open and build a back-end application that targets e.g. netcoreapp2.1 (6 years old target) just fine, it might require installing you an archived SDK for the build to succeed (which you can download regardless, it will complain that it is EOL though) but it's an otherwise simple procedure.

For library code it's even easier - if you have netstandard2.0 target, it will work anywhere from .NET Framework 4.6.1 to the latest version without requiring any maintenance effort whatsoever.

On Windows, Visual Studio will happily work with .NET Framework 3.0 (which is ancient) and more.

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1. a1o ◴[19 Nov 24 16:30 UTC] No.42185278[source]▶
Note Microsoft still removes downloads of previous versions of Visual Studio that aren't the latest - now you can only download VS2022 unless you have some mysterious paid account that has access to those - I don't have in either my personal or my corporate so I don't know the details
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2. trinix912 ◴[19 Nov 24 17:17 UTC] No.42185825[source]▶
This is true and is a pain if you’re stuck on something like Windows 7/8.1 (or 10 in the future). The installer being a web installer that auto-updates on start also means that downloading an older one doesn’t help at all. The only way seems to be to pirate the Enterprise offline installer which of course isn’t really an option.