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Comment by pier25

6 hours ago

The Node team has lost the plot IMO.

By far the most critical issue is the over reliance on third party NPM packages for even fundamental needs like connecting to a database.

21 comments

pier25

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afavour  6 hours ago

What would a Node-native database connection layer look like? What other platforms have that?

Databases are third party tech, I don’t think it’s unreasonable to use a third party NPM module to connect to them.

  • mike_hearn  6 hours ago

    Most obviously, Java has JDBC. I think .NET has an equivalent. Drivers are needed but they're often first party, coming directly from the DB vendor itself.

    Java also has a JIT compiling JS engine that can be sandboxed and given a VFS:

    https://www.graalvm.org/latest/security-guide/sandboxing/

    N.B. there's a NodeJS compatible mode, but you can't use VFS+sandboxing and NodeJS compatibility together because the NodeJS mode actually uses the real NodeJS codebase, just swapping out V8. For combining it all together you'd want something like https://elide.dev which reimplemented some of the Node APIs on top of the JVM, so it's sandboxable and virtualizable.

    • LunaSea  5 hours ago

      > Most obviously, Java has JDBC. I think .NET has an equivalent. Drivers are needed but they're often first party, coming directly from the DB vendor itself.

      So it's an external dependency that is not part of Java. It doesn't really matter if the code comes from the vendor or not. Especially for OpenSource databases.

      5 replies →

  • pier25  6 hours ago

    Bun provides native MySQL, SQlite, and Postgres drivers.

    I'm not saying Node should support every db in existence but the ones I listed are critical infrastructure at this point.

    When using Postgres in Node you either rely on the old pg which pulls 13 dependencies[1] or postgres[2] which is much better and has zero deps but mostly depends on a single guy.

    [1] https://npmgraph.js.org/?q=pg

    [2] https://github.com/porsager/postgres

    • zadikian  1 hour ago

      Maybe MySQL and Postgres should make official Node libs then. Bun maintaining this is ok too, but it seems odd given that it means having to keep up with new features in those DBMSes.

      1 reply →

beart  6 hours ago

Outside of sqlite, what runtimes natively include database drivers?

  • pier25  5 hours ago

    Bun, .NET, PHP, Java

    • Deukhoofd  5 hours ago

      For .NET only the old legacy .NET Framework, SqlClient was moved to a separate package with the rewrite (from System.Data.SqlClient to Microsoft.Data.SqlClient). They realized that it was a rather bad idea to have that baked in to your main runtime, as it complicates your updates.

      1 reply →