ExpressJS 5.0 Released | Hacker News Reader

ExpressJS 5.0 Released

github.com

21 pointstanepiper8 comments

Given how this has been 10 years in the making, I really wonder if this sends a message to the wider community to consider the alternatives like Hono, Elysia, etc. It just looks like this update doesn't speak to the main reasons why people are switching (performance, simplicity).

I wouldn't expect Express to dump Nodejs, but at least attempt to stay competitive.

I know Express will remain in existing projects for decades to come, but it would give me pause when considering what to use for any greenfield project.

You probably dont have enough context to have clarity here, but this release was to unblock performance and simplicity changes. We first needed to clean up 10 years of stagnant code from the years with a single maintainer, now we can remove the worse old decisions and only support node 18. Those changes could not land prior to this release in any form.

We have spent our time on those code changes, leaving nearly zero time for public relations on this, but I hope to start changing that soon. The main thing to take away here is this is a "boring release". It is to unblock more serious changes in v6 and for node core.

> You probably dont have enough context to have clarity here

I clearly didn't, so thank you for dropping by to enlighten me on it.

> We have spent our time on those code changes, leaving nearly zero time for public relations on this, but I hope to start changing that soon

Yes I can tell you at least from where I'm sitting it has felt that the other frameworks have had online presence/excitement, whereas Express has (perhaps wrongly) felt absent. I'm glad to hear you're jumping back into the mix.

Oh no not wrongly at all. The project was on life support with only one maintainer who had stalled out all efforts to onboard new people. I burnt out hard in 2020 from trying and quit. Luckily I found some folks willing to help try again, and we were able to achieve a healthy and positive hand-off of the project governance.

people like to shit on the js ecosystem. but the expressjs folks have done great work. the API has been stable for a long time. if you learned express.js in 2013 - your knowledge is still relevant. how many frameworks can say that.

now there's faster frameworks etc -- but many things built on expressjs keep chugging along.

And now that we finally resurrected the project we can land the perf improvements which were unable to land with one maintainer and still supporting 10y old node versions. We likley will not get it to match fastify, but our goal is likely to make more balanced trade offs. I am excited to see what we can do not that we have broken through the dam which was holding us back.

The first 5.0.0-alpha.1 has been released Nov 7, 2014.

So, ten years.

Isn't it too late?

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