The company blog of Platformatic, a Node.js tooling company, covering performance, Next.js, Fastify, Undici, and running other languages in Node.
HN commenters cite it for Node.js versus Bun performance claims and its PHP-in-Node work; one pushes back on related FFI and experimental features.
fwiw, the opposite view was recently taken for node js. GH hides most of the conversation by default due to size, but the gist is that a new VFS feature is being proposed for node that was largely written using an LLM. I think I've more often seen the view these days that if you used, steered, and likely modified code generated by an AI, you generated the code and hold the copyright.
https://github.com/nodejs/node/pull/61478
https://blog.platformatic.dev/why-nodejs-needs-a-virtual-file-system
Criticism noted! But it is experimental, unconstrained FFI is inherently unsafe, and not all JavaScript developers are "mildly educated web devs".
I doubt we'll see this go into mainstream dependencies likely to be used by such developers – it hasn't in Ruby which has had easily accessible FFI mechanisms for years.
Though, there is already a fun experiment using it: https://blog.platformatic.dev/destino-doom-terminal-nodejs-ffi
Matteo Collina says that the node fetch under the hood is the fetch from the undici node client [0]; and that also, because it needs to generate WHATWG web streams, it is inherently slower than the alternative — undici request [1].
[0] - https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=cIyiDDts0lo
[1] - https://blog.platformatic.dev/http-fundamentals-understanding-undici-and-its-working-mechanism
> Discover why this isn't a step backward but a leap forward in building powerful, efficient web applications.
There are certainly reasons to use JS on the server but efficiency is definitely not a big one. Even less when using React which is probably the slowest of the modern framework/libs doing SSR.
https://blog.platformatic.dev/ssr-performance-showdown
Indeed, the Platformatic folks announced just that last week:
https://blog.platformatic.dev/laravel-nodejs-php-in-watt-runtime
No, Node.js is faster in real workload.
https://blog.platformatic.dev/bun-is-fast-until-latency-matters-for-nextjs-workloads