zx 8.0 for better Node scripting

#​527 — April 9, 2024

Read on the Web

zx v8.0: Google’s Way to Write Shell Scripts with Node — A long-standing way to make scripting a more pleasant experience. zx provides useful wrappers around

, escapes arguments and gives sensible defaults. v8.0 somehow makes zx 20x smaller, faster, makes it easier to kill processes, pass input to commands, and more. A substantial release.

Google

Build a RAG Chatbot App with MongoDB and Node.js — Embark on the RAG to Riches Developer Quest — a month of innovation, learning, and exclusive rewards awaits you. You’ll interact with AI-enhanced bots and learn how to build your own with Atlas Vector Search and Node.js. Register now!

MongoDB sponsor

The April 3 Node.js Security Releases — Includes v18.20.1 (LTS), v20.12.1 (LTS) and v21.7.2 (Current), each rolling out fixes to llhttp and Undici to tackle two HTTP related vulnerabilities.

The Node.js Project

⚠️ There’s also a set of April 9 security releases likely to land later today, if you’d prefer to wait for those.

Bun 1.1 Released with Windows Support — With the codename Bundows, the popular alternative JS runtime can now run directly on Windows 10+ (plus WSL, macOS and Linux, etc). This is a key step in Bun’s broader adoption vs Node, and even features like Bun Shell work on Windows. Node compatibility continues to improve too with support for

and IPC support between Bun and Node processes.

The Bun Team

IN BRIEF:

• Deno 1.42 has been released with JSR becoming a first-class citizen and further Node compatibility improvements.

• A developer explains why they use Node, Deno, Bun, QuickJS and txiki.js – essentially a bulletpoint comparison of the strengths of each.

• Samuel Groß of the V8 team explains the V8 Sandbox, a security mechanism designed to prevent memory corruption in the V8 engine impacting other memory in the process.

Node.js Debugging in Chrome DevTools — If Chris didn’t know how to do it, I’m going to predict many readers don’t either, so his simple example of setting it up might be helpful 🙂

Chris Coyier

Migrating 500+ Tests from Mocha to Node.js — A quick retrospective of how the Astro team migrated more than 500 test suites from Mocha to the Node.js test runner.

Astro

Versioning Workflows with TypeScript — Learn when and how to apply versioning, then practice using our TypeScript SDK in this free, hands-on training course.

Temporal Technologies sponsor

How to Implement Rate Limiting in Express.js — A practical walk through a simple setup. A viable option against certain bots and users, though not a universal solution for DDoS or determined attackers.

Antonello Zanini

🤖 A Quick First Look at Amazon Bedrock (with Node) – Amazon Bedrock is AWS’s service for working with various machine learning models. Raymond Camden

📄 Building an Article Recommendation System with Upstash, Fly and OpenAI Rishi Raj Jain

📄 Managing Node.js Processes “why I think using

is unnecessary and what I think should be done instead.” James Sumners

📺 Building a Modular Monolith with Fastify Matteo Molina

📄 Understanding Threads in Node.js Pavel Romanov

🛠 Code & Tools

JS-Torch: A PyTorch-Like Library for JavaScript — Python’s PyTorch is one of the gold standards amongst machine learning libraries, but this project brings some of its features directly into the JavaScript world. Early days but this could become a big deal for ML in JS?

Eduardo Leao

Flyweight: An ORM Specifically for SQLite — Some interesting ideas here, a little different to your typical ORM.

Andrew Jones

📊 Counterscale: Scalable Web Analytics You Can Run on Cloudflare — A simple web analytics tracker and dashboard that’s designed to be easy to deploy and maintain by hosting it on Cloudflare (for free too, up to a certain level).

Ben Vinegar

Janeway: A Node Console REPL with Object Inspection — Has some neat features including being able to look into buffers with a built-in hex viewer.

Eleven Ways

• PGlite 0.1.2 – Lightweight Postgres packaged as WASM into a TypeScript library for the browser, Node.js, Bun and Deno.

• VineJS 2.0 – Form data validation library for Node.js.

• better-sqlite 9.4.5 – Neat way to use SQLite from Node and Electron (and now supporting Electron 29).

• js-bson 6.6 – MongoDB BSON parser for Node and browsers.

  1	Binary.toString

  and

  1	Binary.toJSON

  now align with BSON serialization.

• node-source-walk 7.0 – Execute a callback on every node of a source code’s AST.

• Nightwatch.js 3.6 – Node.js end-to-end testing framework.

• Electron Packager 29.2 – Customize and package Electron apps.

• stream-to-it 1.0 – Convert Node streams to streaming iterables.

• Mongoose 8.3 – MongoDB object modelling approach.

• Octokit.js 3.2 – ‘Batteries-included’ GitHub SDK.

• 🖼 TIFF 6.0 – Pure JS TIFF image decoder.

• Pino 8.20 – Fast JSON-powered logging.