#​623 — May 7, 2026

Read on the Web
Together with  Memetria
Node.js Weekly

Node.js 26.0 (Current) Released — It's here! Complete with the Temporal API enabled by default, V8 14.6 (say hello to map ‘upsert’ methods like Map.prototype.getOrInsert() and iterator sequencing with Iterator.concat()), plus Undici 8. v26 is the ‘Current’ cutting-edge release until October when it gets promoted to LTS.

Rafael Gonzaga

💡 Node 26.1 (Current) also landed today with a feature that has so much promise I've written a mini article at the end of this issue about it!

Memetria K/V: Efficient Redis & Valkey Hosting — Memetria K/V hosts Redis OSS and Valkey for Node.js apps, featuring large key tracking and detailed analytics.

Memetria sponsor

A Report from the London Node.js Collaboration Summit — What was discussed at the Node team’s latest in-person summit in London last month, including Node’s new release schedule (starting with Node 27), James Snell’s iterable streams API (a.k.a. node:stream/iter), OpenTelemetry support, how to deal with AI contributions to Node, libuv v2, and more.

Wu and Cheung (Node.js Project)

IN BRIEF:

  • Node 20 (Iron) has just entered End-of-Life (EOL). With this, all LTS Node releases can run TypeScript without flags via type stripping.

  • Electron 42 has been released and no longer downloads the Electron binary in a postinstall script due to recent supply chain attacks using that vector. It now downloads itself dynamically the first time it's run.

  • Due to Temporal API support being provided by a Rust library (temporal_rs), building Node 26+ from source requires a Rust toolchain.

Rolldown 1.0: The High Performance JS Bundler — It’s stable, fast, production-ready, and you get esbuild-like speed with Rollup plugin compatibility. Recent Node versions already handle .ts files, ESM, and JSON imports natively, so Rolldown’s real win is in shipping, when you want the smallest tree-shaken runtime artifact possible.

The VoidZero Team

💡 tsdown 0.22, a library bundler built on Rolldown 1.0, has also been released.

Why Migrate to Valibot? — Valibot is a light, modular TypeScript schema validation library and an alternative to the likes of Zod. v1.4.0 just dropped, too.

Fabian Hiller

🛠 Code & Tools

html-to-text 10.0: Advanced HTML to Text Converter — Uses a variety of techniques to convert even complex HTML into plain text (but with some formatting, such as for tables). v10 brings the project up to modern standards.

KillyMXI

Stale API Responses Start with a Stale Data Source — TimescaleDB extends Postgres for analytics on live data. No pipeline, no second database. $1000 credit to start.

Tiger Data (creators of TimescaleDB) sponsor

PM2 7.0: The Production Process Manager for Node.js — The long standing Node-based production process manager (homepage) has been refactored, dropping a large number of external dependencies. It's also extended its Bun runtime support in cluster mode and with the monitoring agent.

Alexandre Strzelewicz (Unitech)

Find My Way 9.6: A Fast HTTP Router That Uses Radix Trees — A ‘crazy fast’ HTTP router that’s framework independent and supports the things you’d expect for path matching. (If you’re a Fastify user, you’re already using it!)

Tomas Della Vedova

opentype.js: Read and Write OpenType Fonts — Get direct access to letterforms. Has broad WOFF, OTF, and TTF support, and supports ligatures, kerning, and emojis. As well as creating paths for text, you can create and save your own custom fonts from scratch too. GitHub repo.

Frederik De Bleser

📰 Classifieds

💫 Lessons-learned: Jon from Judoscale shares what they’ve learned from a decade (!) autoscaling thousands of apps.

🔎 Elastic-quality search for Postgres as an extension. BM25, analytics & vectors — no Elasticsearch required.

📢  Node 26.1 Lands FFI Support

Node.js 26.1.0 (Current) quickly followed Node.js 26 with a single notable feature: an experimental node:ffi module.

FFI (Foreign Function Interface) is a mechanism to directly interface with libraries written in other languages (most commonly those exposing a C ABI).

FFI support has been complicated in Node over the years. node-ffi was an early option, but quite fragile. Koffi offers a more robust take on the idea and continues to work well today, but wasn't adopted as an official, core solution.

Node settled on the Node-API / NAPI approach of writing glue code to bridge the Node / C++ gap, an approach that's now universal in Node libraries with native dependencies.

With this work now in Node 26.1 behind a --experimental-ffi flag, it seems we're finally getting a core, officially supported FFI solution. It integrates with Node's permissions model too (and it's fast).

Here's a basic (macOS only) example I just made to show off the basic shape of the support and how easy it is, though with only a single, simple call:

import { dlopen } from 'node:ffi';
const path = '/usr/lib/libSystem.B.dylib';

const { functions } = dlopen(path, {
  sqrt: { parameters: ['f64'], result: 'f64' },
});

console.log(functions.sqrt(2));  // 1.414213...

I also tried SQLite 3 with some success, and am looking forward to giving Raylib 6.0 a go as an example of a far more complex C library.

My fingers are crossed that Node finds a way to make this stable, so we can all benefit from more direct use of native dependencies in Node in future 😄