As discussed on Discord, an alternative to symlink on Windows already used on projects like Scoop, pnpm and fnm are NTFS juntions. The main drawback of NTFS junctions is it can only be used for directory and it would be necessary another solution for files.

I think it would be a huge security enhancement if Volta didn't make use of symlinks on Windows. Microsoft discourages the use of symlinks, for security reasons, and Developer Mode (which is recommended by Volta) enables much more than just symlinks, many of them are undesirable.

It looks like the main Volta logic is implemented by code and the symlink could be easily replaced by a call to volta-shim. Actually, I made a test replacing rimraf's symlink by a renamed copy of volta-shim and it worked.

If this issue makes sense for the Volta team, I can start working on a PR with this implementation.

PS: this idea came from #964

That's a good idea. I also had a problem with Volta not being available due to permission issues on the company machine. I think it's due to lack of access