~nodeweekly | Bookmarks (149)

Scala.js 1.19.0: Bringing Scala and JavaScript Together — Scala is a powerful language that has grown beyond its JVM roots to also have JavaScript and native runtimes. Scala.js is a Scala to JS compiler and the homepage has some neat code and feature comparisons.

Koa 3.0: The Expressive HTTP Middleware Framework — Koa first appeared over a decade ago as a ‘next-generation’ Web framework that shared some of the lineage (and team) of Express.js, but leaning on more modern JavaScript features and ideas of the time. While Express has been making a comeback recently, Koa has progressed too and offers a compelling alternative. v3.0 release notes.

Seyfert: A Framework for Building Discord Bots — Create bots for the popular chat system starting from bots that respond to simple commands up to creating components and getting user input. Started life being Node only but recent versions support Deno and Bun too. GitHub repo.

Giving V8 a Heads-Up: Faster Startup with Explicit Compile Hints — Not Node specific but a look at a V8 optimization that may become relevant in time. Explicit Compile Hints let you direct V8 to eagerly compile specific files as a way to speed up startup. It ships with Chrome 136.

The Node.js Test CI Security Incident Explained — The Node.js project recently experienced a critical security incident with its test CI infrastructure. Attackers exploited a flaw in the Jenkins pipeline and this post goes into detail about how it came about and was resolved.

Node v22.15.0 (LTS) Released — With over 300 commits, this is a meaty update for the most up to date LTS release of Node, though with no huge features. You can now use system certificates on Windows and macOS, numerous dependencies are updated, doc tweaks, and process.execve makes an appearance.

Repomix: 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. GitHub repo.

Optimizing Node Performance with V8 GC Optimization — Matteo recently ▶️ gave a talk at dotJS about Node’s memory usage and decided to write it up into a blog post too. Matteo notes that high memory usage doesn’t necessarily mean you have a memory leak, explains how V8’s garbage collector works, and how you can tune things specifically for your own use case.

Microsoft Warns About Node.js' Role in Modern Malware — Microsoft’s security team is observing a sharp increase in the use of Node.js to deliver malware and other malicious payloads. This post digs into a couple of examples and what's going on behind the scenes.

Node v20.19.1 (LTS) Released — You know it’s a quiet week when a .1 release is feature-worthy news. Little here except dependency bumps, though, but it’s always good to see an update of what remains a popular Node version (though Node 22 ‘Jod’ should now be your LTS version of choice, ideally).

🤖 node-mlx 0.4: Machine Learning Framework for Node.js — Based upon Apple’s MLX framework targeting Apple’s own chips, node-mlx brings its power into the Node world.

Chrono 2.8: A Natural Language Date Parser — Give it a string like “today”, “last Friday”, “2 weeks from now”, or even an entire date and time, and it’ll come up with a date object to suit.

Fastify + React – 7x Faster than Next.js? — Node’s Fastify framework has a mature plugin for Vite integration (explained in detail here), including @fastify/react which just hit version 1.0 and makes it easy to create fast, featureful (though obviously less so than Next.js) React apps atop Fastify. How fast? Very, it seems.

Bi-Weekly Demo: Find & Fix Errors in Your Application — In this fast-paced 25-min demo, see how Sentry (and Codecov) help you catch Node errors, spot slowdowns, and ship cleaner code—without getting buried in logs. Hosted biweekly by a real human who’s broken plenty of apps, too. 👉 Save your spot.

Comparing Tauri and Electron for Building Desktop Apps — Electron is a natural choice for building JS and HTML-powered cross-platform desktop apps but numerous alternatives have appeared like Neutralinojs and the Rust-based Tauri. This post does a good job of quickly showing how Tauri differs and why you might choose it.

Some Features Every JavaScript Developer Should Know in 2025 — A quick list post breezing through a few more modern areas of JavaScript including iterator helpers, structuredClone(), and set operations.

Lexe: Package a Node App into a Single Executable — Node actually has a mechanism for creating single executable applications and there are numerous other tools to do it, but Lexe takes the approach of using Amazon’s lightweight LLRT engine to make binaries of under 10MB in size. Note, however, "Lexe is not a drop-in replacement for Node.js. It only supports a subset of Node.js APIs."

Prisma ORM 6.6.0 Released — Introduces a new prisma-client generator that’s more flexible and comes with ESM support, plus a preview of an MCP server to let AI agents and tools manage Postgres.

Node.js Testing Best Practices — A detailed guide to modern testing in Node from a group of developers who know all about it. It’s on GitHub but is essentially written like a free book covering over 50 battle-tested tips covering areas as diverse as the ‘Testing Diamond’, testing microservices, checking contracts, verifying OpenAPI correctness, and simulating flaky network conditions.

🎵 Communicate with Ableton Live via WebSockets — Ableton Live is a popular DAW (digital audio workstation) and this opens up a way to control it from Node.js code.

Could JavaScript Have Synchronous Await? — Our favorite JavaScript doctor explores the idea of a synchronous await to erase the divide between sync and async code, explains why it’s enticing, and digs into why performance hits and concurrency headaches make it impractical.

How the Node Team Makes Node.js Downloads Reliable — I’m sure most of us rely on just clicking and downloading Node.js (or having a package manager or CI process do it) and it Just Works™. Turns out there’s a lot going on behind the scenes to keep Node.js quick and easy to download and this tells the full story of an operation that serves...

A Practical Guide to Llama Stack for Node Developers — Red Hat’s Node team has been digging deep into LLM coding in recent months, and now shares its discoveries in using Meta’s Llama Stack (not to be confused with their Llama LLM) – it’s a unified set of APIs for working with numerous parts of the modern LLM-powered stack including models, evals, RAG, tool...

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 to manage and optimize application data effectively.