State of JS runtime environment in Guix

[Ashvith Shetty <ashvithshetty10@gmail.com>]

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Hello,
I've not come across any new issues in a long time with regards to the 
state of JS runtime environment in Guix, hence this mail.

 From my observation:

- NodeJS is severely lagging behind at 18.9.0. The current version is 
23.1.0, I've tried bumpin to 22.0.0, incrementing per patch version, 
but I had to give up, because of the failing test cases which continued 
even after disabling several test cases.

- NodeJS-bootstrap is also severely lagging behind at 10.24.1. It 
should be bumped to somewhere in between 14.21.3 or 16.20.2 - I don't 
know much about bootstraping, but my recent attempt to bump failed 
again, because of the test cases - in this case, failures from 
sequential tests.

- Some of the related packages (llhttp-bootstrap, llhttp) seem to be 
contaminated

- Internal source dependencies (that is, stuff inside `deps/` folder, 
as opposed to the inputs themselves) are painful to deal with, because 
they re-build every time on test-failure and take a lot of resource - 
some of them can be replaced with inputs, thankfully, but some of these 
dependencies (v8, simdutf, simdjson, uvwasi, etc) can contribute to 
increased build time when testing locally. Now, I was able to build 
some of them as a separate package variable, but the main culprit here 
(v8) still isn't a external source dependency - for this, I've also 
opened a issue at GitHub: <https://github.com/nodejs/node/issues/53509>

- Deno's patch needs to be bumped, but the work is still pending, and I 
don't really know much about Rust or Cargo

- I've tried adding Bun, but gave up later because of build failures. 
Nixpkgs simply ELF-patches the binaries, which is probably unacceptable 
in Guix?

- Yarn, PNPM and Lerna are still not available for NodeJS

 - There is a lack of JavaScript or NodeJS-specific maintainer team

Given how the JS development tool is to be in a poor state, I wanted to 
have a discussion about the actions that can be taken to improve this 
situation.

Regards,
Ashvith


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