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Comment by nonethewiser | Hacker News Reader

Jest is the most popular JS testing framework. It's wildly inaccurate to say it was killed.

Looks to me it will be dead soon if they don't figure out how to handle ESM imports. More and more libraries stop packaging commonjs for their new versions. I've been bitten first by d3, then by graphql-request (now graffle), then by msw, then by faker-js. Faker-js, for god's sake! They write in their docs that since version 10, they are incompatible with Jest [0]. Jest seems to be going the way of Enzyme and dodo.

The maintainer of MSW has been screaming for years for people to drop jest [1]

[0] - https://github.com/faker-js/faker/blob/428ff3328b4c4b13ec29d...

[1] - https://x.com/kettanaito/status/1746165619731382351#m

Man we have started with Jest tests for our React Native App half a year ago and now we should already drop it? What should we use instead?? Vitest? How's the compatibility? I'm so exhausted man, glad I'm qutting JS dev soon hopefully.

Vitest, yes. Compatibility with jest is great.

The ultimate win, of course, would be to use the native Node test runner. See the sourse of the Node.js website - I think they have pulled it off despite running a Node.js app.

Problem with vitest is that there's no first class caching if I recall correctly

I think keeping it unsupported for a couple of years, and reluctantly pushing it off to volunteers who barely have enough technical experience to support it is quite close to "was killed".

Until recently Jest had a bug that made it crash due to sl (yes, the famous steam locomotive) running under the hood. This gives a hint at, ahem, the sophistication of its architecture.

The project is long in its EOL, and the only reason for its use is inertia, the jQuery kind of it.

Any idea what people have generally moved on to? Currently using jest but its definitely showing its warts often and is pretty slow. Curious if there is an obvious successor.

Vitest is the incumbent I would say, but there seems to be a lot of momentum behind the runtime-builtin test runners recently. Bun is gaining traction like nothing else, and node has put a lot of work into the test builtins lately.

Node's test runner is a non-contender, at least right now.

If you've ever used any other test runner, you'll find Node's is woefully inferior. I'd say "but maybe it will get better", except I've seen the maintainer responses to several issues, and it seems they are wedded to bad architectural decisions that keep it that way.

The node test runner is perfect for small libraries without build where you pretty much ship the source code. The assertion library is actually superior to vitest’s if you don’t use spies etc. because unlike vitest’s assertions, the node ones do type narrowing correctly.

Vitest is what people have been suggesting to me.

There's always Mocha.

I've had a really good experience with vitest

I moved back to Mocha with Chai for a while (both have great ESM support, quietly still well maintained, despite predating Jest) and then to Node's built-in test harness (and Deno's), sometimes still using Chai rather than `node:assert/strict` or `jsr:@std/assert`.

But I wasn't using a lot of Jest features anyway, generally preferred Mocha even during the height of Jest's popularity, and Node's test runner is sufficient for most of my needs (and Deno's starts to seem more and more the path forward as I come to prefer deno.json in a lot more types of projects than package.json).

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