~nodeweekly | Bookmarks (169)

How Bun Supports V8 APIs Without Using V8 — Bun uses the JavaScriptCore engine, not V8, yet it can support Node addons that rely upon V8’s APIs. Here’s how it works under the hood.

Announcing TypeScript 5.7 Beta — The newest TypeScript is on the way. As always, there's a laundry list of enhancements and features, but the path rewriting for relative paths is a particularly welcome addition for those building server-side apps, enabling easy rewrites of .ts imports into .js at compile time.

Node vs Bun: No Backend Performance Difference? — You can always trust a benchmark to ruffle some feathers, often over the methodology rather than the result. This is no exception, but interesting nonetheless.

Inquirer.js 12.0: A Collection of Common Interactive CLI Controls — Want to ask your users questions? Select from predefined options? Enter a password? Check boxes? (Maybe you want to make sure they’re not affiliated with WP Engine or something ridiculous like that.) Well, then, this is for you.

Node Version Manager Desktop 4.0 — A Tauri-powered desktop app for macOS, Windows and Linux to manage multiple installed versions of Node on your system.

Check Out Depot's GitHub Actions Price Calculator and Optimize Your Builds — Depot just launched a GitHub Actions price calculator! Get a cost breakdown & see how much faster and cheaper Depot is.

pretty-print: Appealing String Representations of JS Values — Produce a string representation of any value. Similar to util.inspect but with many extra options for tree-ifying, coloring, sorting, choosing what to display, etc.

🤖 KaibanJS: A Framework for Building Multi-Agent Systems — Why let Python have all the AI and LLM fun? KaibanJS promises to ‘fill the void’ by offering a JS-first framework specifically for building LLM-powered AI agents.

DOCX 9.0: Generate Word .docx Files from JavaScript — The code to lay out documents is verbose but there’s a lot of functionality baked in and there aren’t many other options for this task. Here’s a CodePen-based example to give you an idea. GitHub repo.

Jeasx: The Ease of JSX with the Power of SSR — A new server side rendering framework built on top of JSX and Fastify.

Node v20.18.0 (LTS) Released; v20 'Iron' Prepares to Bow Out as Active LTS Release — It’s been a quiet few weeks for official releases. This update marks one of the last in Node 20’s run as the active LTS release, and introduces experimental network inspection support. Node 22 will soon take over the active LTS crown (as per schedule) but what will its codename be...

Announcing Deno 2: Node Done Right, Again(?) — What if the inventor of Node got to do it all over again? Deno! v2.0 refines the recipe with a focus on backwards compatibility with Node, an area surely impeding adoption till now. We love the ▶️ epic ‘Announcing Deno 2’ video recorded by Ryan and the team – it’s a mix of entertainment and a ‘keynote-style’...

Become a Better Engineer in Less Than 5 Minutes a Week — Hacking Scale is a bi-weekly newsletter about building and scaling software. Get an engineering story explained in < 1000 words, with hand-drawn visuals, delivered to your inbox. Ship with secrets from Figma or OpenAI.

Jiti 2.0: Runtime TypeScript and ESM Support for Node.js — Long before Node got round to natively adding ES modules support or type stripping, Jiti brought the ability to quickly run TypeScript with native ESM support to Node, and it’s still going. v2.0 adds JSX/TSX import support, the ability to use Jiti via Node’s global hooks, and more.

Building Standalone Executables with Node.js — While the developer experience isn’t quite as nice as with Deno or Bun yet, Node does have experimental support for building single executables of apps that you can distribute to systems which don’t have Node installed.

JavaScript Minification Benchmarks — A frequently updated benchmark suite and results comparing the speed and quality of JavaScript minification across a variety of tools including esbuild, Babel, Bun, SWC, and Uglify.

Gitify: GitHub Notifications From Your Menu Bar — If you get too many GitHub notifications, this utility aims to ‘tame’ them by bringing the notifications to your menu bar on macOS, Windows and Linux. Built using Node and React as an Electron app. And, yes, it's open source.

Building AI Applications on Postgres? Start with pgai — pgai empowers developers with AI superpowers, enabling integration of AI workflows for tasks like embedding creation and model completion.

gradient-string 3.0: Beautiful Color Gradients in Terminal Output — What’s the next step up from colorizing the text output of your Node-powered CLI app? Gradients. v3.0 is rewritten in TypeScript and is a pure ES module.

🤖 node-llama-cpp v3: Run LLMs Locally with Llama from Node — One option for running LLMs locally is to spin up Ollama and speak with it over HTTP, but this makes everything possible with a simple npm package, including within Electron apps. “Say goodbye to setup headaches,” they claim.

exiftool-vendored 28.3: Fast, Cross-Platform Node.js Access to ExifTool — Use this when you want to access embedded EXIF data within image files (particularly those taken with phones or DSLRs).

Simple Git 3.27: Run git Commands in Node Apps — Not a git reimplementation but an interface/abstraction for using the standard Git client from Node code.

µExpress / Ultimate Express: Like Express, But Faster? — It’s not Express, but a reimplementation of Express’s functionality with API compatibility. Based on µWebSockets, and with an optimized router, it boasts faster performance than regular Express, but needs some C++ magic to make it happen.