The NodeConf EU 2026 talks are online

#644 — October 15, 2026

📝 We're taking next week off and will be back on Thursday, October 29.
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Peter Cooper, your editor

Skia Canvas 4.0: A Fast Canvas Environment for Node — Based on Google's Skia graphics engine and produces results similar to Chrome’s own canvas. GPU accelerated and can render images, paths, fonts, shapes, etc. both to static images and live in a native window. v4.0 is faster, lighter, and adds native PDF rendering. GitHub repo.

Christian Swinehart

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▶ The NodeConf EU 2026 Talks — NodeConf EU took place in Italy a few weeks ago and the talks just dropped onto YouTube today covering topics from Node's new FFI features and Emscripten and WebAssembly to V8 heap management and performance profiling.

NodeConf EU / YouTube

IN BRIEF:

Deno is joining Cloudflare to work on folding celld into workerd. Deno itself will get a year of updates before, hopefully, becoming community-maintained.
Node.js v26.12.0 (Current) has been released. Configuration files are now stable as a way to define runtime, test, watch and permission settings.
Node.js v24.22.0 (LTS) has also been released and brings util.throttle and util.debounce to the LTS release.
🔒 Security releases of Node are expected next Wednesday, October 21 across 26.x, 24.x and 22.x release lines to fix at least one 'HIGH' severity issue. Also, Node 24 enters maintenance on October 20, and Node 26 becomes the active LTS line on October 28, the day Node 27's first alpha is due.

Using AWS Lambda Web Functions for Deploying Node Apps — Amazon has launched AWS Lambda Web Functions, a way to run standard HTTP apps (using Express, Hono, Fastify, etc.) on Lambda without needing to rewrite your code around an event handler.

Wood, Wendt, and Karak (Amazon)

📊 WebSocket Servers in JavaScript: Node.js vs Bun vs Deno — It's great to see a win for Node 26 with uWebSockets.js here, with its results getting close to C's low levels of latency, ahead of Bun and Deno.

Daniel Lemire

Up to 10x Faster Postgres for I/O-Heavy Workloads — Managed Postgres on local NVMe, natively integrated with ClickHouse for real-time analytics.

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📄 Zod 4 Got Rid of a Bunch of CPUs for Us – Up to 31% less CPU after upgrading from Zod 3. Chris Arderne (Trigger.dev)

📄 Fast Node.js is Mostly About Doing Less Ishtmeet Singh (NodeBook)

📄 The Disappointing Death of Deno Brett Chalupa

🛠 Code & Tools

TanStack Start 1.0: A Full-Stack Framework Reaches Stability — The increasingly popular full-stack framework for React and Solid goes stable, bringing typed server functions and streaming SSR to apps deployed on Node, Bun, Cloudflare Workers and other targets. Here's how it compares to Next.js.

Tanner Linsley et al.

ImapKit: A Scriptable IMAP Server for Testing Email Clients — An embeddable IMAP server for testing mail clients, with in-memory mailboxes, extensions for numerous IMAP features, and scripted 'faults' to test robustness. Runs inside your tests or can be driven from other languages via a REST API.

Postal Systems OÜ

node-notifier 11: Native Desktop Notifications from Node — A long-standing way to pop up native notifications on macOS, Windows and Linux. v11 goes ESM-only (require() still works) and adds action buttons on Linux.

Mikael Brevik

⭐ Express 5.3 Released — No big new features, but a large number of bug fixes and minor improvements, including to security.

Express.js Team

caniname: CLI Tool to Check Project Name Availability on Netlify and NPM — It's also easy to add checks for other systems.

Bramus van Damme

fast-cli 6.0 – Sindre Sorhus's tool to run download/upload speed tests. A neat way to quickly test speeds as you can run it with npx -y fast-cli
p-queue 10.0 – Promise queue with concurrency control and rate limiting. v10 has zero dependencies, becomes an EventTarget, and runs tasks in the caller's AsyncLocalStorage context.
actions/setup-node 7.1 – GitHub's official Action for installing Node in CI workflows. It can now read the Node version from a mise.toml file.
Happy DOM 21.0 – JavaScript implementation of a browser without a GUI, popular for testing. v21 disables CSS and iframe loading by default.
p-map 7.1 – Library to map over promises concurrently. Now with pMapSettled, keyed variants for objects and Maps, and pMapStop to break out early.
RandExp.js 0.6 – Library to generate random strings that match a regex.
node-oracledb 26.0 – Oracle's official Oracle Database driver.