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The Node.js Top 10: Features, Drivers, Mistakes & Tricks

Node.js Top 10 lists

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Following our interview series on the 10 years of Node.js, we've compiled a few top 10 lists based on opinions of some leading community members and contributors whom we spoke with over the recent months.

Here they are, in no particular order with the exception of Workers which came out tops as the best feature in the history of Node.js so far!

Best Node Feature of the past 10 years?

  1. Workers
  2. Async iterators
  3. Streams
  4. Diagnostic tools
  5. N-API
  6. Http/2
  7. Diagnostic Report
  8. Promises
  9. Native addons
  10. Libuv

Best Reason to adopt Node in the enterprise?

  1. Velocity and beating your competitors to the punch
  2. Speed of development
  3. Stability
  4. Front-end related tasks are still great with Node
  5. Developer productivity
  6. Speed of iteration
  7. npm
  8. Performance
  9. Cloud
  10. Vibrant community

Most Common Node pitfalls/programming mistakes to avoid?

  1. Failing to allow for production-level qualities of service up-front, such as logging, internationalization, monitoring, health checks, metrics etc.
  2. Going full async/await before learning callback style
  3. Assuming a property of an object is present
  4. Unnecessary usage of synchronous operations
  5. Unnecessary usage of native addons
  6. Careless consumption of npm modules
  7. Careless selection of Node.js for wrong workloads
  8. Depending on un-exported Node.js internals
  9. Using Promises without studying them.  It is very common to break the promise chain
  10. Race conditions

Best Node.js Performance tricks?

  1. Fastify codebase contains some neat tricks!
  2. Monomorphism
  3. Debugger; “:)
  4. Use ArrayBuffers to communicate with native addons.
  5. Proper usage of async I/O

You can read back on all our interviews via the links below.

Feel free to share your own entries with us over on Twitter ! Thank you to our participants!

  • Gireesh Puntil - IBM
  • Gabriel Schulhof - Intel
  • Alex Korzhikov - ING Bank
  • Ujjwal "Ryzokuken" Sharma
  • Tomas Della Vedova - Elastic
  • Ricardo Leon - Bloomberg
  • Michael Dawson - IBM
  • Alex Liu - Netflix.

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