Node.js 20 is fast(er)

#​487 — May 23, 2023

Read on the Web

The State of Node.js Performance in 2023 — Nearform’s Rafael Gonzaga reflects on the recent release of Node 20 and puts it through its paces against v18.16 and v16.20 with a few different benchmark suites running on a pretty typical EC2 instance. He goes into a lot of depth that’s worth checking out, but if you haven’t got time: “Node 20 is faster.” 😁

Rafael Gonzaga

Companies Spend 4.5 Trillion Dollars on IT Annually — Find out how they’re building internal tools to increase developer productivity & impact. Explore Retool’s 2023 State of Internal Tools report.

Retool sponsor

Bun v0.6.0: Upping Its Node.js Compatibility Game — A ‘biggest release yet’ of the popular alternative JS runtime adds a built-in bundler and minifier, standalone executable generation, and more enhancements to its Node.js compatibility (something Bun boasts as a feature as a ‘drop-in replacement’, as opposed to Deno where it’s more of a late addition).

Jarred Sumner

How to Build Leaner Node Container Images with UBI and Podman — UBI being Red Hat’s Universal Base Images.

Evan Shortiss

IN BRIEF:

• It’s not just Bun and Deno trying to offer more Node.js support, but Cloudflare Workers now has support for three more Node APIs too:

  1

  node:path

  , the Streams API, and StringDecoder.

• The folks at ReversingLabs wrote about how their researchers found some ‘RATs’ hiding in the npm attic – specifically, the TurkoRat ‘infostealer.’

• Fusion is a promising looking Node.js-based static site generator sent in by a Node Weekly reader. We’ll cover it properly when it hits 1.0.

A Guide to Visual Regression Testing with Playwright — The Playwright browser control library can form the basis of an end-to-end testing mechanism all written in JavaScript, and comparing the visual output of tests can show where things are going wrong.

Dima Ivashchuk (Lost Pixel)

Benchmarking a ‘Compiled’ Node vs Bun App — The latest release of Bun (also above) has the ability to compile apps into a single executable (something Node 20 added too, though the author uses Vercel’s pkg instead). This isn’t a particularly insightful benchmark, but does provide a data point.

Decode

Server-Sent Events with Node — Server-Sent Events (SSE) enable a web server to send real-time updates to the client but without the two-way connection overhead of WebSockets.

endpts Team

🛠 Code & Tools

Better SQLite3 8.4: Fast and Simple SQLite3 Library — With good docs too. Supports a lot of SQLite specific functionality, has a synchronous API that boasts better concurrency than an async one (?) and worker thread support. v8.4 updates it to SQLite v3.42.0 standard.

Joshua Wise

❤️ Postgres — You need a database provider that loves Postgres as much as you do. Fully managed on public cloud with amazing support.

Crunchy Bridge sponsor

ts-sql-query: Type-Safe SQL Query Builder — Want to build dynamic SQL queries in a type-safe way with TypeScript verifying queries? This is for you. Supports numerous SQL-based database systems and isn’t an ORM itself. (Comes from a direct recommendation from a reader who uses it.)

Juan Luis Paz Rojas

Joplin: An Open Source Note Taking and To-Do System — Essentially an open source Evernote, complete with numerous client apps (desktop and mobile) and a server supporting synchronization via cloud services. GitHub repo.

Laurent Cozic

HyperExpress 6.7: High Performance Server Powered by uWebSockets.js — Aims to be a simple yet performant HTTP and WebSocket Server.

Kartik

• Mongoose 7.2
  ↳ MongoDB object modelling library.

• Nodejs SQL Parser 4.7
  ↳ Parse SQL into syntax trees.

• Eta (η) 2.2
  ↳ Embedded JS template engine.

• Ts.ED 7.29
  ↳ TypeScript framework on top of Express.

• zip-it-and-ship-it 9.6
  ↳ Prepare Node Lambda functions for deployment.

• AdminJS 7.0.4
  ↳ Admin panel for Node-based apps.

• rimraf 5.0.1
  ↳

  1

  rm -rf

  util for Node.

• node-sass 9.0
  ↳ Still deprecated, but adds Node.js 20 support.

• Axios Cache Interceptor 1.1