~nodeweekly | Issue 567 - Node 23.8 introduces the URL Pattern API (11)

Subverting Control with Weak References — Node supports WeakMap and WeakRef for working with weak references and James is a big fan of the extra abstractions they unlock. A weak reference differs from a normal reference in that it doesn’t prevent a referenced object from being garbage collected – this might sound like it has limited value, but is quite useful in certain scenarios.

Node v23.8.0 (Current) Released — You can now tell Node to use the system’s trusted CA certificate store with --use-system-ca and there’s an implementation of the URL Pattern API (URLPattern will become a global in Node 24). Other minor enhancements include an update to Node’s timezone data and initial support for the zstd compression algorithm (via node:zlib).

Functional JavaScript First Steps, v2 — A friendly, practical introduction to functional programming fundamentals in JavaScript. Learn the power of the pure function while exploring functional programming paradigms.

Migrating 160K Lines of Production JS to TypeScript Without Downtime — A quick look at the motivation, strategy developed, and a few of the tools that made it a less painful process. But was it worth it? “Absolutely,” Ben says.

A Demo of Running TypeScript Directly in Node.js — “I have published the repository nodejs-type-stripping which demonstrates how to implement a package with a bin script that is written directly in TypeScript (no transpilation).”

Why TypeScript 5.8's --erasableSyntaxOnly Matters — “It disables a bunch of features that I don’t think should ever have been part of TypeScript.”

Optimize Your BullMQ Workers — Queues backed up? Workers over-provisioned? Automatic scaling based on queues is the answer!

upfetch: An Advanced fetch Client Builder — A TypeScript library to enhance fetch with schema validation, automatic response parsing, and type-safety, while maintaining the familiar fetch API.

Mastra: A TypeScript AI Framework from the Gatsby Team — From some of the folks behind the Gatsby React framework comes a new way to build LLM-powered agents that perform various tasks, use knowledge bases, and hold memory. Think a meta-framework like Next.js but for AI agents. GitHub repo.

Opus 0.10: Native Opus Bindings for Node — Bindings for libopus, a library for working with the Opus lossy audio codec.

♟️ Chess.js 1.1: A Library to Manage a Chess Game — Move generation/validation, piece placement, check/checkmate/stalemate detection – “basically everything but the AI”!