https://www.bobhuang.com/series/node-js/Server-side JavaScript across the years it became a platform: async/await and promisification, streams and backpressure, worker threads, ES modules, AsyncLocalStorage, npm workspaces, the built-in test runner, global fetch, the permission model, require(esm), and graceful shutdown.en20 Aug 2024 12:00:00 GMThttps://www.bobhuang.com/blog/1029/node-shutdown-logging-observability/https://www.bobhuang.com/blog/1029/node-shutdown-logging-observability/20 Aug 2024 12:00:00 GMTA service is judged on its worst ten minutes, and the bugs that produce those ten minutes are almost never in your business logic. They are in shutdown, in…https://www.bobhuang.com/blog/1028/node-22-websocket-glob/https://www.bobhuang.com/blog/1028/node-22-websocket-glob/23 Apr 2024 12:00:00 GMTNode 22 reads like a release that went through the dependency list of an ordinary service and moved half of it into core. A WebSocket client, a glob…https://www.bobhuang.com/blog/1027/node-require-esm-interop/https://www.bobhuang.com/blog/1027/node-require-esm-interop/16 Jan 2024 12:00:00 GMTPart 5 left an asymmetry standing: a module could import CommonJS, but CommonJS could not require an ES module. Every library author paid for it, usually by…https://www.bobhuang.com/blog/1026/node-single-executable-applications/https://www.bobhuang.com/blog/1026/node-single-executable-applications/26 Sep 2023 12:00:00 GMT"Install Node 20 first" is a fine prerequisite for a developer tool and an impossible one for a colleague in finance, a CI image you do not control, or an…https://www.bobhuang.com/blog/1025/node-cli-parseargs-readline/https://www.bobhuang.com/blog/1025/node-cli-parseargs-readline/13 Jun 2023 12:00:00 GMTCLIs are where Node's standard library quietly became complete. Argument parsing, interactive prompts, coloured output, and process control are all core now…https://www.bobhuang.com/blog/1024/node-permission-model/https://www.bobhuang.com/blog/1024/node-permission-model/21 Feb 2023 12:00:00 GMTHistorically a Node process could do anything the user running it could: read any file, open any socket, spawn any binary. That is a lot of power for a build…https://www.bobhuang.com/blog/1023/node-corepack/https://www.bobhuang.com/blog/1023/node-corepack/15 Nov 2022 12:00:00 GMT"We use pnpm 8" lives in a wiki, in CI config, in a README, and in someone's global install — four places that drift. Corepack, shipped with Node from 16.9 and…https://www.bobhuang.com/blog/1022/node-test-runner-watch/https://www.bobhuang.com/blog/1022/node-test-runner-watch/09 Aug 2022 12:00:00 GMTJest, Mocha, Vitest, ts-node, nodemon, chokidar — an ordinary Node project used to begin with a page of devDependencies that existed to run and re-run its own…https://www.bobhuang.com/blog/1021/node-18-global-fetch-webstreams/https://www.bobhuang.com/blog/1021/node-18-global-fetch-webstreams/19 Apr 2022 12:00:00 GMTNode 18 shipped in April 2022 with fetch as a global. Read casually that sounds like convenience; in practice it ended a decade of one of the ecosystem's…https://www.bobhuang.com/blog/1020/node-diagnostics-channel/https://www.bobhuang.com/blog/1020/node-diagnostics-channel/28 Sep 2021 12:00:00 GMTInstrumentation has an awkward requirement: the code that reports must not depend on the code that listens, and neither may depend on the other's absence. An…https://www.bobhuang.com/blog/1019/node-node-profiler-cpu-heap/https://www.bobhuang.com/blog/1019/node-node-profiler-cpu-heap/15 Jun 2021 12:00:00 GMT"It's slow" is not a diagnosis, and adding console.time everywhere is not a measurement. Node ships a CPU profiler, a heap snapshot mechanism, and a diagnostic…https://www.bobhuang.com/blog/1018/node-npm-workspaces-monorepo/https://www.bobhuang.com/blog/1018/node-npm-workspaces-monorepo/02 Mar 2021 12:00:00 GMTSplitting a codebase into packages usually comes with a decision: adopt a monorepo tool (Lerna, Nx, Turborepo) or duplicate everything. npm 7 — bundled with…https://www.bobhuang.com/blog/1017/node-top-level-await/https://www.bobhuang.com/blog/1017/node-top-level-await/10 Nov 2020 12:00:00 GMTBefore top-level await (Node 14.8), a module that needed data before it could export anything had exactly one shape: export a promise, and make every importer…https://www.bobhuang.com/blog/1016/node-fspromises-abortcontroller/https://www.bobhuang.com/blog/1016/node-fspromises-abortcontroller/18 Aug 2020 12:00:00 GMTTwo changes made cancellation a first-class idea in Node. The file system got a real promise API (fs.promises, later node:fs/promises), and the AbortController…https://www.bobhuang.com/blog/1015/node-asynclocalstorage-request-context/https://www.bobhuang.com/blog/1015/node-asynclocalstorage-request-context/26 May 2020 12:00:00 GMTA request arrives, and forty frames deeper a function wants the request id so it can log it. The alternatives are all unpleasant: pass it as a parameter…https://www.bobhuang.com/blog/1014/node-optional-chaining-nullish/https://www.bobhuang.com/blog/1014/node-optional-chaining-nullish/11 Feb 2020 12:00:00 GMTNode 14 landed V8 8.1 and with it two operators that had been stuck in proposal limbo for years: ?. and ??. They look like syntax sugar and they are — but they…https://www.bobhuang.com/blog/1013/node-dependency-hygiene/https://www.bobhuang.com/blog/1013/node-dependency-hygiene/19 Nov 2019 12:00:00 GMTAn application's dependency tree is code you did not write, did not review, and ship to production on every deploy. Node's ecosystem is also the largest one…https://www.bobhuang.com/blog/1012/node-http2-in-core/https://www.bobhuang.com/blog/1012/node-http2-in-core/13 Aug 2019 12:00:00 GMTHTTP/1.1's workaround for concurrency is to open several TCP connections and keep them alive, because one connection carries one request at a time. HTTP/2…https://www.bobhuang.com/blog/1011/node-eventemitter-error-handling/https://www.bobhuang.com/blog/1011/node-eventemitter-error-handling/21 May 2019 12:00:00 GMTAlmost every Node API is an EventEmitter underneath: servers, sockets, streams, child processes, the process itself. It looks like the simplest thing in the…https://www.bobhuang.com/blog/1010/node-esm-vs-require/https://www.bobhuang.com/blog/1010/node-esm-vs-require/05 Feb 2019 12:00:00 GMTFor years require() was the only way to load code in Node, and it was genuinely different from the import the browser wanted. Node 12 made ES modules work…https://www.bobhuang.com/blog/1009/node-workers-threads-parallelism/https://www.bobhuang.com/blog/1009/node-workers-threads-parallelism/27 Nov 2018 12:00:00 GMTNode's single thread is a feature until someone hands it a CPU-bound job. A tight loop blocks the event loop, so every other request waits — and async/await…https://www.bobhuang.com/blog/1008/node-streams-pipeline/https://www.bobhuang.com/blog/1008/node-streams-pipeline/11 Sep 2018 12:00:00 GMTStreams are Node's answer to data larger than memory, and the source of its most misdiagnosed bug: a process whose memory climbs while it copies a file. The…https://www.bobhuang.com/blog/1007/node-util-promisify/https://www.bobhuang.com/blog/1007/node-util-promisify/14 May 2018 12:00:00 GMTEverything in Node's standard library was a callback API first, and the ecosystem is full of third-party modules written the same way. You do not have to wrap…https://www.bobhuang.com/blog/1006/node-async-await-basics/https://www.bobhuang.com/blog/1006/node-async-await-basics/19 Feb 2018 12:00:00 GMTFor most of Node's first decade, "asynchronous" meant a callback and a growing pile of indentation. Node 8 shipped async/await on top of promises, and Node 10…