BIG new feature lands in Node.js // The Code Report

Key Takeaways

it is february 4th 2022 and you're watching the code report news you can use javascript developers are famous for their ability to reinvent the wheel in node.js for example there are many ways to work with the hypertax transfer protocol if you hate yourself you might use its built-in http module but there is a smorgasbord of third-party packages like axios node fetch got request super agent and hundreds of others they're extremely popular and account for tens of millions of weekly downloads just this week developers got some surprise news with a pull request adding support for the fetch api natively in node.js just a mere six years or so after it became an industry standard via what double eug stop trying to make fetch happen it's not going to happen fetch is not perfect but it has proven itself to be good enough to where we don't need to wrap it with a billion other packages just to avoid mental health issues but why is this a big deal well fetch provides a generic definition of request and response objects and allows you to manage them with a simple promise-based api because fetch and node is pretty much identical to the browser developers have less mental overhead when translating between front-end and back-end code sharing common apis also makes it much easier to develop packages that work both in node and the browser it's something that other runtimes like dino and cloudflare workers have already implemented so they deserve some credit for giving node some friendly competition fetch sounds cool so how do i use it as of today it's not in a public release but you could build node from source if you're really motivated keep your eyes peeled for node version 17.5 where it should be available under an experimental flag then expect it to be a standard issue weapon by note 18. the implementation is based on a package you can use today called undici which is named after the character 11 and stranger things we can install it in a node project then import fetch it makes scripting a node really nice because to make a git request all we have to do is await fetch to access data from any website or api and we don't even need an async function because node also supports top level await now to make a post request we can use the same function and modify some of its options like the method body and headers that's pretty nice but one question on a lot of people's minds is what does this mean for axios in my opinion i think there will still be a place for third party libraries but the vast majority of projects will be able to get by with what's built into node instead of reaching to install a third-party package for every project speaking of things that are dead in other news i'm sad to report that our twitter bot bob has been terminated it's my fault because i didn't realize that building twitter bots with open ai is not allowed i feel terrible about this but i really don't want to lose my api key because i have a lot of other cool ideas for open ai bob had a short but impactful life and apparently he meant a lot of different things to a lot of different people his final words before i pulled the plug were i'll be back i don't want to end this video on a sad note so in other more uplifting news facebook or meta was down 25 yesterday and zuckerberg's net worth declined by about 30 billion dollars this has been the code report thanks for watching and i will see you in the next one