Node Weekly Issue 584: July 1, 2025

#584 — July 1, 2025

Together with

Modern Node.js Patterns for 2025 — We’ve reached the half way point for the year, so why not take a moment to reflect on the potential of Node as it stands right now? Ashwin reminds us of various aspects including the use of ES modules, built-in Web APIs, the test runner, watch mode, the permission model, import maps, and more.

Ashwin

Node v22.17.0 (LTS) Released — A notable LTS release as assert.partialDeepStrictEqual() gets promoted to stable along with numerous long-time experimental APIs/functions, and a few Node 24 features get backported.

Antoine du Hamel

💡 Node v24.3.0 (Current) has been released, with no significant new features.

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Ecma International Approves ECMAScript 2025: What’s New? — The Ecma General Assembly has approved the ES2025 language specification, which you can read in full here, or you can enjoy Dr. Axel’s more succinct explainer instead.

Dr. Axel Rauschmayer

Secure Your Express APIs in 5 Minutes with Cedar — Cedar is a language and spec for defining permissions and evaluating them. Its new authorization-for-expressjs enables Cedar-based authorization for Express.js apps.

Trevor Schiavone (AWS)

IN BRIEF:

🦋 The Node.js project has an official Bluesky account where updates are shared, but the team wants your input into what sort of content they should post.
Ryan Dahl checks in with a quick update on the ongoing JavaScript™ trademark dispute. Oracle has about a month to respond in full to Deno's cancellation petition.
The official Node blog is celebrating June's Pride Month with a look at the concept of identity and a profile of Emilia Smith who made some early, notable contributions to Node.js.

V8: Speculative Optimizations for WebAssembly using Deopts and Inlining — A very technical post from the V8 team about two significant new optimizations in the V8 engine that make WebAssembly code run much faster.

Daniel Lehmann and Matthias Liedtke (V8)

📄 How to Use NestJS as a Signaling Server for WebRTC Video Chat Christian Nwamba

📄 How to Write Compelling Software Release Announcements Michael Lynch

📺 Using Claude Code to Build a GitHub Actions Workflow – Simon takes a Python-oriented approach but you could just as easily tell Claude to use JavaScript or even shell scripting here. Simon Willison

💬 Why Does My Node Multiplayer Game Lag at 500 Players with Low CPU? – A public discussion. Hacker News

🛠 Code & Tools

Transformers.js 3.6: Now You Can Run Gemma 3n from Node — Transformers.js brings the power of Hugging Face’s popular Python Transformers library into the world of JavaScript, enabling the use of various machine learning models for NLP, vision, audio processing, and more (thanks to ONNX). The big feature in v3.6 is support for Google’s new Gemma 3n model.

Hugging Face

💡 In mildly related news, Meridius Labs has been building an unofficial library for working with the new Apple Foundation models on macOS Tahoe.

Real-Device Testing for iOS Safari, Now Playwright-Friendly — Curious how your web app behaves on iOS Safari? You can now run Playwright tests on real iOS devices via BrowserStack.

BrowserStack sponsor

Repomix 1.0: Pack Your Codebase Into AI-Friendly Formats — Enter a GitHub URL and choose various settings for the output (XML, MD, etc). It’s Node.js-based and available to use in a library-like form for your own tooling creations too. v1.0 is essentially a ‘this is stable and complete now’ release. GitHub repo.

Kazuki Yamada

Marked 16.0: A Fast Markdown Parser and Compiler — Demo here to see it in action. GitHub repo.

Christopher Jeffrey

whatsapp-api-js: A Library for Whatsapp's Official API — For those with a Meta Business App with WhatsApp API activated.

Tomás Raiti

dotenv v17.0 – Module to load environment variables from .env if you're not using Node's built-in mechanism to do this yet.
Electron v37.0.0 – The cross-platform desktop app toolkit.
npm-package-json-lint 9.0 – A package.json linter for Node projects.
🤖 OpenAI v5.8.0 – Adds support for the OpenAI API's new webhooks and 'deep research' features.
better-sqlite3 v12.2 – The popular powerful SQLite library gets updated to the latest SQLite 3.50.2.
xero-node 13.0 – Node SDK for the Xero accounting system.
Mineflayer 4.30 – Create Minecraft bots in JavaScript.
Undici 7.11 – Node's powerful HTTP client library.

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🎧 The Node (and more) Banter – a weekly, uncensored dive into Node and scale, where Luca Maraschi and Matteo Collina share war stories, anti-patterns, and laughs. Subscribe!

📢 Elsewhere in JavaScript

A roundup of some other interesting stories in the broader JavaScript landscape, in case you've missed them:

The Deno team takes a look at what's coming to JavaScript with some quick explainers and sample code covering nine proposals advanced at recent TC39 meetings.
🐘 PLJS is an extension for Postgres for writing database functions in JavaScript (powered by QuickJS) instead of PL/pgSQL.
The speaker lineup for JSConf 2025 has been announced. It takes place in Maryland this October.
If Cloudflare Workers are just too limited for your use case, Cloudflare now has a new option: Cloudflare Containers. Containers is integrated with Workers but, unsurprisingly, lets you package up your app in container images and run them in a flexible way.
Alex Kladov shows how easy it is to create a server-side statically generated RSS feed reader – he uses Deno, but you could quite easily use Node here too.
🕒 The Temporal API proposal is now a Stage 3 Draft.