~nodeweekly | Issue 550 - All aboard the (high speed) Express train (12)

µExpress / Ultimate Express: Like Express, But Faster? — It’s not Express, but a reimplementation of Express’s functionality with API compatibility. Based on µWebSockets, and with an optimized router, it boasts faster performance than regular Express, but needs some C++ magic to make it happen.

Jiti 2.0: Runtime TypeScript and ESM Support for Node.js — Long before Node got round to natively adding ES modules support or type stripping, Jiti brought the ability to quickly run TypeScript with native ESM support to Node, and it’s still going. v2.0 adds JSX/TSX import support, the ability to use Jiti via Node’s global hooks, and more.

Building Standalone Executables with Node.js — While the developer experience isn’t quite as nice as with Deno or Bun yet, Node does have experimental support for building single executables of apps that you can distribute to systems which don’t have Node installed.

JavaScript Minification Benchmarks — A frequently updated benchmark suite and results comparing the speed and quality of JavaScript minification across a variety of tools including esbuild, Babel, Bun, SWC, and Uglify.

Gitify: GitHub Notifications From Your Menu Bar — If you get too many GitHub notifications, this utility aims to ‘tame’ them by bringing the notifications to your menu bar on macOS, Windows and Linux. Built using Node and React as an Electron app. And, yes, it's open source.

Building AI Applications on Postgres? Start with pgai — pgai empowers developers with AI superpowers, enabling integration of AI workflows for tasks like embedding creation and model completion.

Superdiff 2.0: Compares Two Arrays or Objects and Return a Diff — Got two similar objects and want to see the underlying differences?

gradient-string 3.0: Beautiful Color Gradients in Terminal Output — What’s the next step up from colorizing the text output of your Node-powered CLI app? Gradients. v3.0 is rewritten in TypeScript and is a pure ES module.

🤖 node-llama-cpp v3: Run LLMs Locally with Llama from Node — One option for running LLMs locally is to spin up Ollama and speak with it over HTTP, but this makes everything possible with a simple npm package, including within Electron apps. “Say goodbye to setup headaches,” they claim.

Cacheable: A Suite of Caching Packages — A popular dependency that provides a simple, generic caching module, as well as a way to wrap native HTTP requests with RFC compliant cache support.

exiftool-vendored 28.3: Fast, Cross-Platform Node.js Access to ExifTool — Use this when you want to access embedded EXIF data within image files (particularly those taken with phones or DSLRs).

Simple Git 3.27: Run git Commands in Node Apps — Not a git reimplementation but an interface/abstraction for using the standard Git client from Node code.