> otoh for the typical present-day software project you don't want to re-create an identical build result as someone else got six months ago According to whom?

> otoh for the typical present-day software project you don't want to re-create an identical build result as someone else got six months ago According to whom? I absolutely want to be able to do this. > if it's a JavaScript project then Node is going to be two versions out of date and probably full of security bugs from that time Sounds like building on something as unstable as Node is a significant drawback. That's a Node problem. (I missed how we got to talking about Node, anyway—you said "JavaScript project". NodeJS does not have a monopoly on JS. It's not even a great example of a particularly good JS runtime; for the reasons you mention—instability—it's actually a pretty good example of a bad JS runtime.) Fortunately if you're doing JS, there's an incredibly stable set of interfaces available for you to program against, and the best part is you don't need to download anything extra because every computer already has a JS runtime installed.