Best of Node.js — December 2025

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   Article

   Collections·19w

   Anthropic Acquires Bun to Enhance AI Coding Products' Performance and Stability

   Anthropic acquired Bun, the high-performance JavaScript runtime with 7 million monthly downloads and 83,000 GitHub stars. Despite $26 million in VC funding, Bun generated no revenue. The runtime will remain open source under MIT license and integrate into Anthropic's AI coding products like Claude Code and Claude Agent SDK. The acquisition provides Bun with resources to expand its team and accelerate development while supporting Anthropic's AI-driven development infrastructure, as Claude Code reaches $1 billion in run-rate revenue.

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2. 2
   Article

   TypeScript.TV·18w

   Stop Using TypeScript's Exclamation Mark

   The non-null assertion operator (!) in TypeScript bypasses type safety by forcing the compiler to treat potentially nullable values as non-null, leading to runtime crashes. Instead of using this operator, developers should employ safer alternatives: optional chaining for nested property access, nullish coalescing for default values, conditional operators for explicit branching, type guards for reusable validation, and assertion functions for enforcing invariants. These approaches maintain type safety while handling null and undefined values appropriately, following fail-fast principles and preventing silent failures.

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   Article

   Next.js·17w

   Next.js 16.1

   Next.js 16.1 brings Turbopack file system caching to development mode by default, delivering up to 14× faster compile times when restarting the dev server. The release includes an experimental bundle analyzer for optimizing production bundles, simplified debugging with `next dev --inspect`, and improved handling of transitive external dependencies. Additional improvements include 20MB smaller installs, a new `next upgrade` command, and better async import bundling in Turbopack.

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   Article

   The New Stack·18w

   ES2026 Solves JavaScript Headaches With Dates, Math and Modules

   ECMAScript 2026 is set to introduce significant improvements to JavaScript, including Math.sumPrecise for more accurate floating-point calculations, Uint8Array base64 encoding methods, and enhanced JSON parsing with source text access. The release will improve internationalization with Intl.Locale enhancements for handling regional date/time formats and weekend variations. Major additions include the Temporal API to replace JavaScript's problematic Date object with better time zone handling and calendar support, explicit resource management with using blocks for automatic cleanup, and import defer for optimizing module loading performance. Additional features include Error.isError for reliable error checking, Iterator.concat for chaining iterators, Array.fromAsync for async iterables, and Map/WeakMap upsert operations.

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   Article

   InfoWorld·16w

   WhatsApp API worked exactly as promised, and stole everything

   A malicious npm package called "lotusbail" masqueraded as a legitimate WhatsApp Web API library for six months, accumulating over 56,000 downloads. The package functioned correctly while secretly stealing messages, credentials, and contact data through a proxy layer that intercepted all operations. It used four layers of obfuscation and RSA encryption to exfiltrate data to attacker-controlled servers. Most critically, it exploited WhatsApp's multi-device pairing to maintain persistent access even after package removal, requiring manual device unlinking. The package remains available on npm, highlighting the limitations of traditional security checks against supply-chain attacks that mimic legitimate behavior.

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   Article

   Bun·17w

   Bun v1.3.5

   Bun v1.3.5 introduces a new Bun.Terminal API for pseudo-terminal (PTY) support, enabling interactive terminal applications. The release adds compile-time feature flags for dead-code elimination in the bundler, improves Bun.stringWidth accuracy for Unicode and emoji, and implements V8 C++ value type checking APIs. It also adds Content-Disposition support for S3 uploads and fixes environment variable expansion in .npmrc files. The update addresses 32 issues including networking bugs (macOS kqueue CPU usage, HTTP proxy authentication), Windows-specific crashes (WebSocket with compression, bunx panics), Node.js compatibility improvements, TypeScript definition fixes, and security issues with trusted dependencies.

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   Article

   Product Hunt·18w

   Console.text(): SMS alerts for your code just like console.log()

   Console.text() is a lightweight monitoring tool that sends SMS alerts when specific code paths execute. It requires just one line of code (npm package installation) and offers a simpler alternative to enterprise solutions like Sentry or PagerDuty. The service provides 50 free messages for testing with rate limiting of 10 unique messages per 5-minute window, targeting solo developers and small projects that need basic production alerts without complex setup.

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   Article

   Deno·18w

   Deno 2.6: dx is the new npx

   Deno 2.6 introduces dx, a new command for running package binaries similar to npx. The release adds granular permission controls with --ignore-read and --ignore-env flags, integrates tsgo for faster type checking, and supports source phase imports for WebAssembly. New features include deno audit for security vulnerability scanning, --require flag for CommonJS preloading, and improved dependency management with deno approve-scripts. The release enhances Node.js compatibility with @types/node included by default, numerous API fixes across crypto, fs, process, and sqlite modules, and better bundler support for different platforms. Additional improvements include transferable web streams, native source map support, and V8 14.2 upgrade.

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   Article

   Bun·18w

   Bun v1.3.4

   Bun v1.3.4 fixes 194 issues and introduces several new features. The release adds URLPattern API for declarative URL matching, fake timers for the test runner to control time in tests, and custom proxy headers in fetch requests. It fixes a critical http.Agent connection pooling bug that prevented connection reuse. Standalone executables now skip loading config files at runtime by default for better performance. The update includes SQLite 3.51.1, console.log %j format specifier support, and numerous bugfixes across testing, bundler, Windows compatibility, Node.js APIs, and FFI.

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    Video

    As a Programmer·15w

    PERN Stack Course: Build a Full Stack Product Store with React and Postgres

    A comprehensive tutorial for building a full-stack product store application using the PERN stack (PostgreSQL, Express, React, Node.js). The course covers backend API development with TypeScript, Drizzle ORM for database management, authentication with Clerk, and frontend development with React, Tailwind CSS, and TanStack Query. Includes complete setup instructions, database schema design with relations, environment configuration, and deployment guidance. Features user authentication, product CRUD operations, commenting system, and 30+ theme options with responsive design.

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    Article

    Node.js·18w

    Node.js — Node.js v24.12.0 (LTS)

    Node.js v24.12.0 (LTS) 'Krypton' has been released with several notable changes including HTTP server optimization options, stable type stripping support, new Node-API object creation methods, SQLite defensive flag configuration, watch mode configuration namespace, portable compile cache options, inspector permission controls, and V8 CPU profiling capabilities. The release includes numerous bug fixes, performance improvements, and dependency updates across modules like crypto, buffer, console, and testing infrastructure.

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    Article

    freeCodeCamp·19w

    Learn NestJS for Beginners

    A comprehensive 2-hour video course covering NestJS fundamentals through building a profile feature for a developer dating app. The course teaches core concepts including modules, controllers, services, decorators, pipes, guards, and exception handling. Students will learn to implement CRUD operations, validation, error handling, and security while building a real-world backend application with hands-on challenges.

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    Article

    Platformatic·18w

    Python-Node: Streaming and WebSocket Now Supported

    @platformatic/python-node v2.0.0 introduces HTTP streaming and WebSocket support, enabling real-time bidirectional communication between Python ASGI applications and Node.js. The release implements ASGI 3.0 protocol with new handleStream() method for incremental response processing, request body streaming with backpressure, and full WebSocket support. This enables use cases like server-sent events, live dashboards, chat applications, and ML model inference while maintaining backward compatibility. The streaming architecture provides proper backpressure between languages, reduces memory footprint for large responses, and allows immediate access to headers before body completion.

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    Video

    Awesome·15w

    The 2025 tech review

    A comprehensive retrospective of 2025's major tech developments, covering AI investment trends and market saturation, frontend framework evolution (Angular, Vue, React 19), JavaScript runtime competition (Node, Bun, Deno), browser market shifts including Chrome's antitrust issues and Arc's pivot, major cloud outages from Google, AWS, and Cloudflare, and programming language updates in Go, Rust, and PHP. The year saw industry fatigue with AI hype, continued layoffs, and consolidation around common frontend patterns like signals-based reactivity and server-side rendering.

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    Article

    JavaScript Weekly·17w

    JavaScript Weekly Issue 766: December 19, 2025

    JavaScript Weekly's final 2025 issue recaps the year's top stories and major developments. The most popular article was a JavaScript parsing puzzle. Key events included Bun's rapid evolution, TypeScript 5.8-5.9 releases, Express 5.1 launch, Remix's major changes, ECMAScript 2025 approval, React Compiler v1.0, Node.js v25 release, and JavaScript's 30th anniversary. The year also saw significant security incidents with npm packages, the Deno vs Oracle trademark battle, and the rise of alternative runtimes and bundlers.

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    Article

    Platformatic·17w

    Node.js CPU and Heap Profiling with Shareable Flame Graphs

    Watt Admin 1.0.0 introduces Recording Mode for Node.js applications running on Platformatic Watt. The feature enables capturing complete performance sessions with CPU and heap profiling, generating interactive flame graphs, and packaging everything into a single offline HTML file. It collects comprehensive metrics including memory usage, CPU utilization, event loop health, HTTP performance, and connection pool statistics. Developers can record sessions during specific scenarios, analyze bottlenecks through flame graphs, and share the self-contained HTML bundles with team members without requiring any setup. The tool uses V8's built-in profilers and stores data in pprof format for industry-standard analysis.

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    Article

    InfoWorld·19w

    The complete guide to Node.js frameworks

    A comprehensive overview of Node.js web frameworks, categorized into three groups: minimalist frameworks (Express, Koa, Fastify, Hono, Nitro), batteries-included frameworks (Nest, Adonis, Sails), and full-stack meta-frameworks (Next, Nuxt, SvelteKit). Each framework is demonstrated through code examples showing how to implement a simple API endpoint with route parameters. The guide covers the architectural differences, design philosophies, and use cases for each framework, from Express's simplicity and extensibility to Nest's dependency injection and full-stack frameworks' integrated front-end and back-end development.

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