Comment by wruza

This doesn’t work. Developers move on to a next version for reasons out of their control. Now a user has a version hell, just like c:\python{all, sorts, of, versions}, and probably a versioned file extension. Bundling tens of megabytes is not a problem for the last ten years. Having everything you need right in your backpack is a good thing for everyone.

It could be feasible if software communities didn’t tend to underimplement features and then solve them by intertwining all sorts of dependencies and their maintenance policies. For example, for as controlled thing as typescript, there are at least four popular ways to “just run” projects, all with different quirks and issues (tsc & node, ts-node, swc-node, tsx). Although it was obvious that people would want to run and watch .ts files based on tsconfig.json, without an explicit compilation step.