Raise minimum Node.js version to 18

[jonkoops]

Raises the minimum Node.js version to 18, as version 16 will be end-of-life on September 11th. See the Node.js release schedule for more information.

[frederikprijck]

Thanks, i was about to do that but you beat me to it 🎉😀

[jonkoops]

@frederikprijck I think you'll have to remove the Node 16 status check from the required checks in the GitHub settings, otherwise this PR will not pass the status checks.

[frederikprijck]

Yes will look at getting the pr's merged tomorrow.

[tsheaff]

Is this done just to reduce the burden on the team needing to support this (e.g. the test suite failures), or is there an actual known incompatability with node v16 that is inspiring this?

I have a dependency that relies on [email protected], and I'm planning to upgrade node eventually but it's a larger project than I'd like to take on right now (I'm on v16, I understand that it's technically been end-of-lifed), so just confirming that if I do yarn install --ignore-engines for this, I'm not going to cause a real or subtle breakage. cc @jonkoops

[frederikprijck]

@tsheaff This was done because node 16 is no longer supported from the node side, and we do not support unsupported platforms or runtimes where possible as that has potential security risk and is something you want to avoid. That said, node 16 should support atob, so you might be good. But we do not have support for that, so usage is at your own risk.

If you want to be sure, clone our repository and run our test suite against node 16, but realy, you want to update node to 18 at least.

Additionally, u can also stick to using v3 until you are on node 18. Both v3 and v4 are considered rather stable and dependency-less and the code base is pretty identical if you ignore the polyfil we ship in v3.