Problem Description

On a windows machine without, for example, snappy in the require path, mongodb ends up in an infinite loop when trying to optionally require snappy.

This is beacuse a bug in the package require_optional

The search starts in the given path, if the file isn't found it continues with the parent folder, and so on in a loop. The stop criterias for the loop are

1. The file is found
2. The current path equals '/'

It never matches the second critera on a Windows machine, where paths starts with the drive letter, for example 'C:\'

See bug for description:

https://github.com/christkv/require_optional/issues/11

A PR for this has been available since Nov 9 2018 without being merge

https://github.com/christkv/require_optional/pull/8 

I think it's safe to say the package is dead!

The infinite loop happens directly in the require('mongodb') call.

Possible fix

Switch to the package require-optional: https://www.npmjs.com/package/require-optional 
The mongodb package uses require_optional with only one parameter. This is functionally equal to calling require-optional with only one parameter, so a search and replace for:

require('require_optional')

to 

require('require-optional')

is enough.

I've successfully monkey patched my system's node_modules/mongodb this way.