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Comment by rao-v | Hacker News Reader

What is the right recommendation at this point for a Node alternative? Deno?

What's wrong with just using Node? It's stable, has a good (and growing) standard library and has enough backing to be self sustaining.

edit: There's also nub which is built on top of Node.js and removes some rough/legacy edges: https://github.com/nubjs/nub

It consolidates a lot of really annoying nits and quality of life aspects like bundling, module resolution, testing, env handling, etc. Node is just the runtime and still would require libs like esbuild, jest/vitest, dotenv, and so on. It's genuinely nice to have those out of the box, and generally in Bun the performance is quite significantly better in places that matter.

Let me address each one in turn:

- esbuild - this is normally for TS compilation, which Node can run natively now by stripping types: https://nodejs.org/docs/latest/api/typescript.html#type-stri...

- jest/vitest: Node has a test runner: https://nodejs.org/docs/latest/api/test.html

- dotenv: Node can read .env files: https://nodejs.org/docs/latest/api/cli.html#--env-filefile

Performance, maybe you're right - but if you're doing any IO, I doubt the runtime is really the bottleneck.

Node.js is virtually the only platform not supporting the Fetchable convention:

https://github.com/nodejs/node/issues/63096

https://fetchable.org/

That's a fair criticism... they move slower but mostly because they were the first. They would have to build a new Server and Request/Response primitives from scratch, or deprecate what they already have, or somehow shoehorn the existing types into the new ones.

They do seem to have just merged in support for Web Workers though, which I've been following for a while: https://github.com/nodejs/node/issues/43583

So I don't think they're opposed to standardising, but it's trickier when you have some past cruft built up. Lets not forget that the fetch() standard was built for browsers, and is a bit of a stretch to make it work on servers at all. You have to diverge from the fetch spec to even make it make sense in a server environment (with things like Cookies handling off the top of my head).

Same thing can be said about Streams in Node.js as well. They had a working streams implementation before the Web Streams API was in browsers (iirc). So implementing the standard now means removing what's already there, or breaking a lot of existing code.

Which leads to confusing things like the fact that there are two streams APIs in Node now:

Streams: https://nodejs.org/docs/latest/api/stream.html

Web Streams: https://nodejs.org/docs/latest/api/webstreams.html

And they have to support going back and forth between the two: https://nodejs.org/docs/latest/api/webstreams.html#nodejs-st...

It's exactly the same story for crypto as well. Node created it's own standard, Web standards emerged, Node has to support both:

https://nodejs.org/docs/latest/api/crypto.html

https://nodejs.org/docs/latest/api/webcrypto.html

Fwiw I think it's good they're not removing the legacy code, but they should probably do a big cleanup major release and lean into the modern standards and remove the old stuff. But there's obviously push back in doing so... and probably stuff you can do in the old modules that you can't do in the new and vice versa.

Yes, I've dealt with streams a lot and I've seen the pain. I'd say it's the 2nd biggest "compat breaking" of Node/JS after the require vs esm, but while the require vs esm is mostly gone (we all use esm nowadays, except for aham the default npm) the stream types I expect will last for a long while since that's not so "high" in the productivity list for most. Also, that's actually one of the main pains I have with Node NOT supporting Fetchable, the fact that the Body is not a Readable.

When we used to code by hand, Bun used to have an amazing list of articles on how to convert from almost any kind of streamable to almost any other type. I used it a lot, and that was when I started liking Bun so much.

I wasn't even aware it exists, so no big problem.

It also doesn't support the foobaz protocols! But millions of companies are using it to serve millions of customers, and it's fine.

I'm still waiting for v1.4 as I have committed to Bun so much. Not looking good, though.

What’s wrong with node? Genuine question

Nothing. Bun is just smaller and faster and comes with a built-in package manager, test runner, bundler, SQL engine, image processor etc..

I think npm install can be very very slow on large projects. Think minutes.

Use pnpm or yarn, also available with node.

From the perspective of someone trying to package nodejs, building it is a complete dumpster fire. GYP (generate your projects) is a now defunct and poorly thought out build tool that node heavily relies on with it's native C/C++ modules. Cross compiling is completely broken and I am honestly surprised it builds reliability for the native target.

C++ addons are great, that is what makes JavaScript on the server bearable, when performance matters and we're stuck with it, instead of using Go, Rust, Java, .NET.

It's 1/2 baked in everything it tries to do.

You need a "separate" tool called npm to install packages. It's dead slow so they added corepack. Another extra tool. Then you use it to install yarn or pnpm. Another extra tool. It might still be slower than bun...

In the past you need to transpile typescript with other tools. It can only run js out of the box. The later fix was a wasm build, which means slower than it could be. Another 1/2 job.

Many more examples in many areas but anything Node tries to do itself feels 1/2 baked.

Bun and Deno are faster than Node because it is a 1/2 job at its core. It has v8. It has the tools. It could be done but no. It did nothing for years until Deno and Bun came on the scene to nudge it.

So JavaScript in general.

Not that my opinion matters much, but I like Deno. I never tried Bun.

But why do you need an alternative to node in the first place?

imo, node is fine, they have done a lot to improve and the menagerie of js runtimes have largely converged

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