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Comment by Waterluvian | Hacker News Reader

My initial reaction is:

We’re supposed to be thrilled about a years old API finally landing in Node? A built-in test system when there’s so many great choices by not being batteries included? A standard update to catch up to the latest Chromium?

Other than the fourth point (yay a better watch mechanism!) this actually persuaded me to think that maybe Node is stale.

Well… not stale. Stable. Maybe at my ripe old age of 36 I’m a curmudgeon, but I think it’s fine to just focus on maintenance mode and following the browser for API and feature guidance.

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I'm 100% in favor of being able to do more things with fewer dependencies, so yes. I think having watch, test, and fetch built in are great.

I agree. I am glad Node is getting there despite dragging its feet. The DX with all the package boilerplate is atrocious compared to what it could be.

Even if Deno, Bun etc were to fizzle out, I am glad they exist to show the way and put pressure on Nodejs at bare minimum.

> Even if Deno, Bun etc were to fizzle out, I am glad they exist to show the way and put pressure on Nodejs at bare minimum.

This is how I felt about io.js back in the day too, and about vim versus neovim; competitive pressure works.

This is a slight misnomer in my opinion. When those dependencies are bundled into Node you have fewer listed dependencies, yes, but you haven't actually reduced the amount of external code you rely on.

You have a single vendor to worry about— like Microsoft when you use .NET, Google when you use Go, etc. You obviously will always have external dependencies unless you build everything from your own hardware up. But it’s clearly a win to vet and trust one vendor, and have one solid, trusted platform to build on vs pulling in literally thousands of dependencies from random vendors as is common in most JS stacks.

That's a fair point. Currently I'm not convinced all of this is the right direction for Node, but we'll see how it pans out. Node is already huge so I would much rather they pick their battles and do those features well, rather than try and be mediocre at everything.

That’s the thing. I think Node is struggling to keep up with pace of web platform standards.

It does feel like that. I’m rather surprised to learn that Fetch is landing now?

Yea for real. I’m sure there’s tons of reasons why it took so long, there’s gotta be some devil in the details. Maybe the standards compliance, complexity of the code base, something something “ecosystem”, all the above…

Feels like a similar situation to CJS/ESM, which is still a headache in Node regardless of its support

Test runners have been super requested lately in the Node GitHub issues. I have not understood why that is because writing a test running of your own is trivial.

It’s trivial but not useful when good solutions already exist

No it’s very not, show us your trivially written test runner

And then the terrible tests you wrote for your terrible runner.

The bookkeeping isn’t hard, but the matchers and the lifecycle bits get tricky.

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