volta

> you will incur into a slightly performance cost because of the bash/zsh/fish shell you need to spawn before running your code While Volta does have a shim, it’s written in a sensible systems language (Rust)[0], so it does not spawn a shell. It only determines the correct process and arguments to run and launches it as a subprocess. There will be overhead to read from disk and determine which version of node/npm to run and a syscall to actually launch the subprocess, but that should be very minimal and nowhere near the cost of initializing a shell. The result is that Volta feels faster than similar tools that are written in scripting/shell languages. It also enables better Windows support since there’s no reliance on a system having a POSIX shell. [0] https://github.com/volta-cli/volta/blob/main/src/volta-shim....

Volta shows promise and I like that it's fast. But to me it seems like it will be hard to adopt until it supports `.node-version` file (a working standard among node version managers). For example, while some may want to use Volta, others will likely be using `nvm`. And a project's CI likely uses `nvm`. Volta has `volta` property for `package.json` to pin the node and npm version. That's nice and more specific than the `engines` property which can be a range of versions. But it would be better to keep things DRY and leverage the working standard for how node version managers keep track of the node version. (Otherwise a project has to maintain node version information in multiple places.) https://github.com/volta-cli/volta/issues/959