Package Managers and Dependency Hell

Imagine there are three modules: A, B, and C. A requires B at v1.0, and C also requires B, but at v2.0. We can visualize this like so:

Now, let's create an application that requires both module A and module C.

Dependency Hell

A package manager would need to provide a version of module B. In all other runtimes prior to Node.js, this is what a package manager would try to do. This is dependency hell:

Instead of attempting to resolve module B to a single version, npm puts both versions of module B into the tree.