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.

Java has a great ecosystem. It’s well thought out and I can compile and run 10 year old projects no problem. In fact, I wish everyone had just copied Java’s model instead of inventing their own worse model.

I love Python but it has a terrible package ecosystem with mediocre tooling that has only gotten worse with time.

JavaScript has gotten better but it seems they are just re-learning things that were long figured out.

When I see new package managers, I just see a list of problems that they forgot to account for. Which I find strange when there have been many package managers that you can learn from. Why are you re-inventing the wheel?

Javascipt is a horrible language because it basically is missing a standard library so you need external dependancies even for the most basic things that are already present in other languages. Python has a very rich standard library. You can do a lot with libc, if you had a c++ Qt project then it would provide you with basically everything you could ever need.

I check out C projects which have not been updated in 15 years and run make.

You can't use 'pip install' in debian because they chose to do that during the transition from python2 to python3. You should use 'pip3 install' which is provided by package python3-pip from debian.

One can argue that this decision should be revised by debian but you should not install packages on system python installation for working into projects. Always use virtual environment.

I don't know if any API does this, but I often wished that APIs I used could mark up just a tiny, tiny subset as @FutureSafe, like the opposite of tagging deprecated code, so that for smaller projects you could stick to only or mostly those parts and know that you can come back after 2 years or 20 years and things still work. Maybe throw in a compiler flag to verify that nothing not-@FutureSafe is used by accident. Sometimes you just want to write something small, once, and not have to actively maintain it forever. Outside of shell-scripts or retro-platform code you can barely write Hello World for any target today and feel confident that it will still run six months from now.

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.