Reports of Node's death are greatly exaggerated

JS Party: JavaScript, CSS, Web Development

Amal, KBall & Chris convene a “semi-emergency” pod to discuss the recent (deserved) hype over Bun and what it all means for Node’s community, maintainers & users.

They’re joined by Node Technical Steering Committee members Matteo Collina & James Snell who are here to dispel Bun antagonism rumors, discuss the pros & cons of each runtime, explain how Node continues to thrive & even announce a VERY big upcoming feature!

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Sponsors:

• Convex – Convex is a better type of backend — the full-stack TypeScript development platform that lets you replace your database, server functions, and glue code. Get started at convex.dev
• Appwrite – Build Fast. Scale Big. All in One Place. Appwrite is a backend platform for developing Web, Mobile, and Flutter applications. Built with the open source community and optimized for developer experience in the coding languages you love.
• Fastly – Our bandwidth partner. Fastly powers fast, secure, and scalable digital experiences. Move beyond your content delivery network to their powerful edge cloud platform. Learn more at fastly.com
• Fly.io – The home of Changelog.com — Deploy your apps and databases close to your users. In minutes you can run your Ruby, Go, Node, Deno, Python, or Elixir app (and databases!) all over the world. No ops required. Learn more at fly.io/changelog and check out the speedrun in their docs.

Featuring:

• Matteo Collina – Website, GitHub, Mastodon, X
• James Snell – Website, GitHub, Mastodon, X
• Amal Hussein – GitHub, X
• Kevin Ball – Website, GitHub, LinkedIn, X
• Christopher Hiller – Website, GitHub, Mastodon, X

Show Notes:

• Matteo’s tweet on Jarred Summer’s obsession with performance optimizations
• Bun’s claim to being a “drop in-replacement for Node.js”
• Platformatic 1.0 release annoucement
• AWS lambda quatas
• Node TODO - your guide to getting started with Node.js Core development
• Node.js’s new built-in test runner
• Node.js project governance
• Matteos recent newsletter which Amal magically connected with in the future - “My thoughts on Bun and other Adventures”
• fastify - “Fast and low overhead web framework, for Node.js”
• OpenJS foundation
• Soon to be released PR for adding the new WebSocket lib to Node Core
• Node.js supported binaries
• Node.js github issue #19308 “Adding Websocket support to core” which is 5+ years old and coincidentally closed on the day this podcast was released

Something missing or broken? PRs welcome!

Capitole

1. It's party time, y'all (00:00:00)

https://jsparty.fm/300

2. Sponsor: Convex (00:00:39)

https://www.convex.dev/?utm_source=changelog&utm_medium=newsletter&utm_campaign=changelog-news

3. SEMI-EMERGENCY POD (00:03:15)

4. Welcoming Matteo & James (00:04:23)

5. How Node is structured (00:09:29)

6. Manufactured controversy (00:13:47)

7. Hints of Node's success (00:20:10)

8. diff node bun (00:26:22)

9. Paying for performance (00:31:54)

10. On scale and bottlenecks (00:40:20)

11. Sponsor: Appwrite (00:45:26)

https://appwrite.io

12. Bun for tests & CI? (00:48:09)

13. Bun performance trade-offs (00:50:37)

14. Security features & compromise (00:54:33)

15. Node's legacy patina (00:56:01)

16. What breaking Node looks like (01:03:39)

17. Zig talk (01:05:46)

18. Node maintainers (01:10:00)

19. Amal's announcement (01:14:12)

20. The money question (01:17:47)

21. Node needs to learn what people want (01:22:37)

22. Announcement! Announcement! (01:26:18)

23. Listener Q: Eric Clemmons (01:29:18)

24. Listener Q: Kyle Beard (01:34:54)

25. Connecting with Matteo & James (01:37:55)

26. Wrapping up (01:39:01)

27. Next up on the pod (01:39:31)

https://jsparty.fm/300