You probably dont have enough context to have clarity here, but this release was to unblock performance and simplicity changes. We first needed to clean up 10 years of stagnant code from the years with a single maintainer, now we can remove the worse old decisions and only support node 18. Those changes could not land prior to this release in any form.
We have spent our time on those code changes, leaving nearly zero time for public relations on this, but I hope to start changing that soon. The main thing to take away here is this is a "boring release". It is to unblock more serious changes in v6 and for node core.
> You probably dont have enough context to have clarity here
I clearly didn't, so thank you for dropping by to enlighten me on it.
> We have spent our time on those code changes, leaving nearly zero time for public relations on this, but I hope to start changing that soon
Yes I can tell you at least from where I'm sitting it has felt that the other frameworks have had online presence/excitement, whereas Express has (perhaps wrongly) felt absent. I'm glad to hear you're jumping back into the mix.
Oh no not wrongly at all. The project was on life support with only one maintainer who had stalled out all efforts to onboard new people. I burnt out hard in 2020 from trying and quit. Luckily I found some folks willing to help try again, and we were able to achieve a healthy and positive hand-off of the project governance.
And now that we finally resurrected the project we can land the perf improvements which were unable to land with one maintainer and still supporting 10y old node versions. We likley will not get it to match fastify, but our goal is likely to make more balanced trade offs. I am excited to see what we can do not that we have broken through the dam which was holding us back.
In case you are not aware (maybe you are) node has experimental support for http imports. I personally think this feature is a disaster for many reasons, but if you want to use it in your toy apps it is there in node.
Not my area of work, but pretty sure that is expected behavior to resolve an ever changing set of services being called out to. Better to do dns resolution than for a call to fail and have to re-resolve while you wait on a loading screen right?
Point number three is critically important and no matter how many nerds complain it is not activity pub or some crypto thing, the company focus on delivering a product which is viable to use by normies is awesome.
I full time'd for nearly a year with just three cell devices and the Open Signal app. The only time I had issues was when we watched some shows and used our bandwidth "cap" on our unlimited plan and it throttled me the next morning. I picked up the third device (an att mifi type thing) after that and haven't had a problem since. The only restriction was that we check cell coverage where we were planning to stay before booking if I was going to be working and without easy access to a coffee shop or RV park WIFI.
We full time'd for a while towing a 40ft trailer with a diesel f250. While it is obviously not "efficient" relative to smaller rigs, it is way more efficient than living in a house and commuting daily even with an EV. This is one of those things I don't think people realize about "low carbon impact living" (or whatever you would want to call it), you likely get 80% there just by not heading/cooling a 2k sqft house all the time.
Of the past three years we have spent about half of it (full time for the first year and a min of 4 months each year since) traveling with our daughter in a 40ft fifth wheel. The small space has been even more impactful with a small child, it was GREAT! Between waking up and being able to walk her out to the beach, or when it is rainy not having a mess of toys all over a house, lots of things balance out the effort invested in the traveling portion. Especially when you get a rhythm with it like we did while we were full timing.
