Deno is an interesting sandboxed Typescript VM that uses URLs for dependencies: https://deno.land/
It's created by Ryan Dahl (who created node.js) and tries to fix what he sees as design issues/complexities in node.
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I made some changes to a node express project that I haven't touched in almost five years. I was pleasantly surprised that I only needed to update one dependency to get it working again!
(It was sqlite3, which is a native dependency using node-gyp.)
It feels like a mature software project is one where bugs require multiple commits to fix.
You've hammered out the basic issues, so the remaining issues are often weird interactions between components.
A pleasant surprise: updating the direct dependencies in difftastic has reduced the total transitive dependencies. I wasn't expecting that.