Node.js 26.0.0 (Now with Temporal)

143

aaarestad about 21 hours ago 49 commentsRead Article on nodejs.org

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Analyzed from 1192 words in the discussion.

Discussion (49 Comments)Read Original on HackerNews

jdthedisciple•about 18 hours ago

> Upsert (https://github.com/tc39/proposal-upsert): [Weak]Map.prototype.getOrInsert(), [Weak]Map.prototype.getOrInsertComputed()

Their usage of upsert appears different than I was used to:

Me: Upsert = Update or Insert

Them: Upsert = Get or Insert

bakkoting•about 18 hours ago

The proposal used to do more thing and we didn't change the URL after we ultimately arrived at this set of APIs.

AdieuToLogic•about 13 hours ago

> Their usage of upsert appears different than I was used to: > Them: Upsert = Get or Insert

I agree that their choice of labeling the proposal as "upsert" is less than ideal. However, this functionality is reminiscent of a very useful Perl capability known as autovivification[0] as described in the motivation section:

  A common problem when using a Map or WeakMap is how to 
  handle doing an update when you're not sure if the key 
  already exists in the map.

0 - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Autovivification

OptionOfT•about 16 hours ago

Reminds me of the weird C++ map operator[] behavior.

If you use that operator and the value doesn't exist, it'll default create one and return a reference to that.

And as I'm writing this I realize why... references cannot be `null`.

rtpg•about 15 hours ago

what is the value of an "update or insert" call on `Map`? is that not just set?

`getOrInsert` here seems to be the Python "set_default" method on dicts, which is very useful at avoiding tedium in some basic data munging

AdieuToLogic•about 12 hours ago

> what is the value of an "update or insert" call on `Map`?

It gives a caller the option of alternate logic based on the existence, or lack thereof, of a value.

> is that not just set?

No. The semantics of a "set" operation would overwrite an existing entry (if one exists).

pjmlp•about 20 hours ago

26.2.0 is already out, why link to the previous release?

https://nodejs.org/en/blog/release/v26.2.0

What I would expect with the inclusion of temporal, is having a section on nodejs docs about Rust addons, alongside the C and C++ sections.

aarestad•about 19 hours ago

That's on me - I saw v26 was released, but didn't realize they'd already done a point release in the ensuing 2-3 weeks!

petercooper•about 19 hours ago

https://nodejs.org/en/blog/release/v26.1.0 is particularly cool as it added initial FFI support.

sexylinux•about 7 hours ago

This API is inherently unsafe. Invalid pointers, incorrect signatures, or accessing memory after it has been freed can crash the process or corrupt memory.

Absolutely great idea to expose such "features" to the web dev world!

All the JS devs that are already struggling with mildly complicated language features will love the giant new field of bugs they only dreamed of.

The arrival of the first very hyped tool that will make activating FFI support a requirement will be a great moment in JS history. Happily an army of mildly educated web devs will activate a feature which potential risks they do not even understand.

Luckily nowadays supply chain attacks are a thing of the past in the JS world, oh, wait...

noodlesUK•about 20 hours ago

I'm really looking forward to the temporal api being universally available. Moment and Luxon are fairly good but sensible date/time handling is something that really ought to be baked into the platform ootb.

jpsimons•about 20 hours ago

I always thought the old Date is kind of elegant... increment anything with an overflow and it all wraps around correctly, like `d.setDate(d.getDate() + 100)` to advance a date 100 days. "March 208th" is interpreted like you'd expect, as are the hours and minutes and such.

Of course, complete lack of non-local non-GMT time zones is a huge downside.

kaelwd•about 1 hour ago

`d.add({ days: 100 })` also wraps like you'd expect. `d.with({ day: 208 })` becomes the last day of the month instead but "March 208th" is kinda nonsense anyway so whatever. You could emulate it with `d.add({ days: 208 - d.day })`

keeganpoppen•about 20 hours ago

i'm pretty sure all that stuff works w/ Temporal... Temporal is extremely well-designed, in my experience. the js date object, on the other hand, has insane pitfalls, and i say this as someone who thinks not understanding JS ASI is a "skill issue", among other happily-un-"ergonomic" worldviews...

kaoD•about 17 hours ago

That's how you get date bugs.

culi•about 20 hours ago

Until then, a solid backfill has been available for quite some time

chrisweekly•about 19 hours ago

Tangent: if you use Node.js at build time you should check out VitePlus https://viteplus.dev

(No affiliation, just a fan of VoidZero's consistently excellent tools.)

KronisLV•about 19 hours ago

Oh hey, they're the people behind Oxlint and Oxfmt: https://oxc.rs/

I moved some projects over to those from ESLint + Prettier and while the compatibility isn't 100% (I didn't need that), and the time to process a codebase went from like way over a minute with the old tools to a few seconds with theirs.

rumblefrog•about 19 hours ago

Looks interesting, what's their revenue model? Or how do we know it won't be abandoned in the near future?

shimman•about 17 hours ago

The same as any other dev tool startup, once money gets tight they will monetize and users will rightfully revolt.

Evan You won't break the cycle, tale as old as time.

lioeters•about 16 hours ago

After getting burned so many times on libraries, frameworks, services and platforms, even entire languages - one learns to be wary of critical dependencies. Every new project offers convenience in exchange for you giving up control of part of the software stack, and the power dynamic is often exploited sooner or later as revenue source. You can't trust anything that becomes irreplaceable, or that you can't write it (or at least understand it) yourself.

manniL•about 17 hours ago

VoidZero's business model is in Void, their deployment platform. Open source projects will always stay open source. This was announced at the very beginning.

jauco•about 19 hours ago

Also the release that drops typescript transforms: https://github.com/nodejs/typescript/issues/51

(I’m not disagreeing to remove it. It just took me a while to find out what happened to it)

pier25•about 18 hours ago

Initially it didn't make sense to me... but it looks like type striping is really the way to go for future TS.

There's the "types as comments" proposal[1] which could even land on browsers one day.

I started using the erasableSyntaxOnly setting in my tsconfig to get ready for this.

[1] https://tc39.es/proposal-type-annotations/

sexylinux•about 7 hours ago

At this point we should really prompt all the AI power in the world we have to create a TS replacement. It seems grotesque.

torgoguys•about 19 hours ago

I thought this was the release where the built in sqlite got its experimental tag removed, but I don't see it in the release notes. THAT'S got me excited more than Temporal. A stable API, huge utility and one less dependency.

dieulot•about 6 hours ago

It was made a release candidate in the previous (non-LTS) major version, in v25.7.0 from February.

Release notes: https://nodejs.org/en/blog/release/v25.7.0

Issue: https://github.com/nodejs/node/pull/61262

sedatk•about 18 hours ago

Off-topic but, Safari seems to be the only browser that doesn't support Temporal yet. It looks like the only blocker for adopting it on web.

https://caniuse.com/?search=Temporal

owebmaster•about 17 hours ago

No but Google wants to control the Web (they do).

OptionOfT•about 16 hours ago

Node v26 doesn't ship with corepack anymore. Annoying, it was a decent way to get pnpm in-band.

emilfihlman•about 18 hours ago

It's so sad that node refuses to add websocket server support.

Adding websocket would simplify stuff tremendously, as well as make deployments much, much more secure.

skybrian•about 18 hours ago

Why more secure?

I see that Deno has WebSockets, but I've never used them: https://docs.deno.com/api/web/~/WebSocket

emilfihlman•26 minutes ago

Because it entirely removes dependency for external libraries and package repositories, like npm, for basic internet interoperability.

I (also) basically use only one package: ws.

owebmaster•about 17 hours ago

"ws" is regularly the only package in my package.json

emilfihlman•25 minutes ago

Same. Without that I could remove all npm dependence, which would greatly improve security.

actionfromafar•about 19 hours ago

And here I thought that it was about https://github.com/temporalio/sdk-typescript

jollymonATX•about 17 hours ago

(Now with Malware) I joke! It already had malware.

cute_boi•about 20 hours ago

Node JS team should look into bun and make progress. They are somewhat stable, but bun have lot of features and is more performant than Node.

classicposter•about 4 hours ago

No, Node.js is faster in real workload.

https://blog.platformatic.dev/bun-is-fast-until-latency-matt...

HatchedLake721•about 20 hours ago

/s ? Bun is not yet (ever?) compatible with Node. I'm sure if Node JS could trim the fat with breaking changes they'd be fast too

xkcd-sucks•about 17 hours ago

Honest question, what isn't compatible? Where I work we've simply replaced node with bun across a lot of overcomplicated + crappy projects, and on my work+personal computers I alias bun/bunx to node/npx with seemingly no issues at all

bel8•about 19 hours ago

I expect bun to run almost everything that node runs these days. They have an extensive test suit to ensure that.

Even the complicated NextJS runs with Bun: https://nextjs.org/conf/session/nextjs-bun

Do you have a source for your claim?

vichle•about 19 hours ago

Maybe if you start from scratch with a new project, but when migrating an old project it's definitely not a drop-in replacement. I try once or twice per year, but it's not worth the effort when the upside isn't that big.

notnullorvoid•about 18 hours ago

In my testing Bun wasn't much faster most of the time, usually on par for all non-IO related stuff, and there were some cases with scheduling where Bun was noticable slower.

pjmlp•about 18 hours ago

I see no reason to leave node in what concerns JavaScript runtimes.

postepowanieadm•about 19 hours ago

They should the unexpected and vibe code node to zig. Or Odin for the kicks.

karel-3d•about 19 hours ago

they should rewrite their whole stack by AI from one language to another language, it seems fun.