Node.js 20 is now available

Re:Node.js 20 is now available by patdx on Tuesday April 18, 2023 @09:54PM (#35623307)

The big problem is Express code like the following will either hang the HTTP request forever (--unhandled-rejections=warn), until the client times out and gives up, or crash your whole server, taking down any other HTTP requests in progress (--unhandled-rejections=throw):

  const db = {
    async getUsers() {
      throw new Error("failed to connect to database");
    },
  };

  app.get("/", async (req, res) => {
    const result = await db.getUsers();
    return result;
  });

There are various monkey patches/wrappers you can use to make async errors work the same as sync errors, but it is easy to forget and hard to understand, especially for newbies. Many other frameworks handle async/sync errors in a more consistent way.

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Re:Node.js 20 is now available by cipheredStones on Tuesday April 18, 2023 @10:13PM (#35623455)

Already fixed in Express 5 (which is technically still in beta, but that just seems to be the maintainer being very conservative about a major release): https://expressjs.com/en/guide/error-handling.html

> Starting with Express 5, route handlers and middleware that return a Promise will call next(value) automatically when they reject or throw an error. For example:

> app.get('/user/:id', async (req, res, next) => { const user = await getUserById(req.params.id); res.send(user) })

> If getUserById throws an error or rejects, next will be called with either the thrown error or the rejected value. If no rejected value is provided, next will be called with a default Error object provided by the Express router.

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Re:Node.js 20 is now available by re-thc on Tuesday April 18, 2023 @10:48PM (#35623690)

> which is technically still in beta, but that just seems to be the maintainer being very conservative about a major release

There hasn't been a new beta in a long time. Last release about a year ago and then the 1 before that about 3 years ago. Not a very convincing beta.

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Re:Node.js 20 is now available by cipheredStones on Tuesday April 18, 2023 @10:58PM (#35623766)

I'm not sure whether you mean "not very convincing" in the sense of "not reassuring that it works" or something else, but judging from users' comments on this issue about the release plans, it seems to work just fine: https://github.com/expressjs/express/issues/4920

The maintainer said this three months ago in a comment on that issue:

> Express 5 is pretty much completed at this point, and we're just finishing up the last code merges in upstream modules in order to bump the dependencies finally in the 5.0 branch.

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Re:Node.js 20 is now available by re-thc on Wednesday April 19, 2023 @12:20AM (#35624200)

> it seems to work just fine

Like how Windows XP on an old computer still "works just fine"?

What does work just fine in terms of software that's ever updating mean? It doesn't matter if it's called 4 or 5 or any other label.

On the comments: my point is more that we should not base the NodeJs standard on something that's not regularly maintained / updated. There are infinite amount of things that can be improved on for a "standard" server framework used by millions. You don't say Node "is done" and leave it? People would definitely fork it or move on (as happened in the past).

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