Node Weekly Issue 579: May 27, 2025

#579 — May 27, 2025

🖊️ I'm back from my week "off" attending Google I/O. Unfortunately there wasn't much of relevance to Node, but it does give us two weeks of news to catch up on here :-)
__
Your editor, Peter Cooper

Together with

A Report From April's Node.js Collaboration Summit — Twice a year, a large group of Node contributors and community members get together to discuss the project, brainstorm ideas, and push forward new initiatives. This time, they talked about the recent CI security incident, Async Context, improving Node’s ability to compile apps into executables, Undici, module loader hooks, and better integration with Chrome’s DevTools.

Joyee Cheung and Chengzhong Wu

CodeRabbit’s Free AI Code Reviews in IDE - VS Code, Cursor, Windsurf — Code Rabbit brings AI code reviews to VS Code, Cursor & Windsurf. Get line-by-line reviews, one-click fixes & codebase-aware feedback - all free in your IDE. Seamlessly integrates with git workflows. Install the extension & start reviewing!

CodeRabbit sponsor

Node.js TSC Declines to Endorse Feature Bounty Program — There was recently a debate around whether the Node.js project should establish a formal feature bounty program to enable end users to offer monetary rewards for specific features. This post summarizes why the official response is no, for now.

Sarah Gooding (Socket)

⚡ Announcing TypeScript Native Previews — Earlier this year, Anders Hejlsberg teased a 10x faster TypeScript through efforts being made to port the TypeScript compiler to Go, enabling it to be compiled and run natively, as well as take advantage of more concurrency. You can now try it for yourself.

Microsoft

IN BRIEF:

The Glitch platform, a popular way to build and host Node-backed webapps, is shutting down its app hosting functionality – it seems uncertain quite what Glitch will or won't be after July. Former Glitch employee Keith Kurson writes more about it here.
Astro 5.8 has been released and drops support for all Node versions prior to v18.20.8. Angular 20, due later this week, is also set to drop Node 18 support entirely.
You have just three more days to take the latest Node.js Next 10 survey.
Node v24.1 (Current) has been released.
Node v22.16.0 (LTS) has also been released, notably adding node.config.json support.
Seokho Song writes about becoming the latest V8 committer.

Six Ways Slack, Notion, and VS Code Improved Electron App Performance — An experienced Electron app developer shares a guide to Electron performance optimization and how to get the most out of your apps.

Amila Welihinda

A Developer’s Guide to Migrating from API Keys to OAuth 2.1 — Many still rely on API keys for service-to-service auth. But with MCP making OAuth 2.1 mandatory, it’s no longer just a “nice-to-have.” Here's what’s changing and what it means for your architecture.

Scalekit sponsor

📄 Styling Console Text in Node.js – There are numerous ways to do this. Dr. Axel Rauschmayer

📄 Unpacking Node.js Memory - From Raw Bytes to Usable Data – An introduction to ArrayBuffer, TypedArray, and Buffer. Anton Ödman

📄 How the at() Method Makes Array Indexing Easier Matt Smith

🛠 Code & Tools

Google Gen AI SDK for TypeScript and JavaScript v1 — Why let Python developers have all the fun? Now you can harness the full power of Google’s Gemini API (and Vertex platform) from Node too. v1.0 landed a few days ago, but today we also get v1.1 which includes CommonJS support. The Gemini docs and examples now use it too (if you select JavaScript).

Google

Astra: A New JavaScript-to-EXE Compiler for Windows — Boasts “a new approach to compiling” JavaScript applications for a single executable experience on Windows only (for now).

QwertyCodeQC

Defuddle: Extract the Main Content from Web Pages — Strips extraneous clutter from HTML in order to leave only the primary content for you to format or use as you wish. Essentially a modern implementation of the ideas behind Mozilla’s Readability. There’s an online demo if you want to give it a try.

Steph Ango

express-generator-typescript: An Express.js + TypeScript App Generator — Creates the boilerplate for a TypeScript-powered Express.js app. Now uses Express.js 5.

Sean Maxwell

Express Slow Down 2.1 – Basic rate-limiting middleware for Express that slows down responses rather than blocking.
🖼️ exiftool-vendored 30.0 – Cross-platform access to ExifTool for managing metadata in multimedia files.
oauth2-mock-server 8.0 – OAuth 2 mock server for development and test purposes.
Slonik v48 – Node.js Postgres client with runtime & build time type safety.
node-pg-migrate 8.0 – Database migration management from Node.js.
octokit.js 5.0 – 'All-batteries-included' GitHub SDK for JavaScript.
image-type 6.0 – Detect the image type of a Buffer/Uint8Array.
Multer 2.0 – Node middleware for handling multipart/form-data.
Faker 9.8 – Generate fabricated data to your heart's content.
file-type 21.0 – Detect the file type of a file, stream, or data.
Mineflayer 4.29 – Create Minecraft bots in JavaScript.
Undici 7.10 – Node's powerful HTTP client library.
Commander.js 14.0 – Node.js CLI app framework.
FoalTS 4.6 – Full-featured Node.js framework.
ESLint v9.27.0

📰 Classifieds

bit.dev - open-source tool providing AI-powered development workspaces, fostering architectural clarity and enabling zero-overhead composable components.

🚀 Node.js Kafka client: Why we built the most performant, DX-friendly Kafka client with native TypeScript support and ease of integration.

📢 Elsewhere in JavaScript

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

🎉 The Deno team put together a fantastic timeline of JavaScript's history to celebrate JavaScript's 30th birthday this year.
🦖 On the topic of Deno, Ryan Dahl decided to set the record straight with Reports of Deno's Demise Have Been Greatly Exaggerated.
Nicholas C. Zakas wrote a retrospective of the ESLint 9.0 transition including some of the teething issues encountered along the way.
This sort of thing is almost a weekly story now, but Socket's threat research term has discovered yet more malicious npm packages attempting to exfiltrate info from developer's machines using post-install scripts.
A developer put Node, Go, Rust, C++, Java, Python and Erlang under an intensive stress test to see how they handle being overloaded. Node did pretty well, but eventually failed under intense memory pressure.