Node.js now available in Haiku | Haiku Project

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TLDR: pkgman install nodejs

As some have already known for a long time, many platforms have had support for writing software in JavaScript or TypeScript with the help of the Node.js runtime and over the years, much of the software written by developers these days have gradually been written in either of those languages. However, Haiku has lacked a Node.js port for quite sometime and it wasn’t possible to run or develop JavaScript based software or libraries that depended on the Node.js runtime. Now I can say that Node.js is available for Haiku and can be downloaded from HaikuDepot on 64 bit (32 bit support is being worked on). The version which is currently available is 12.3.1 and is already being updated to the latest version at the time of this writing to 12.10.0 and support for the upcoming LTS version is also coming to HaikuPorts. Several patches have been upstreamed by members of the HaikuPorts team to projects such as libuv (cross-platform async I/O library), GN, etc and we hope to upstream to larger projects like V8 (Google’s JavaScript engine used in Chromium and QtWebEngine) and the Node.js project, which will ease the bringup of a future Node LTS release for Haiku.

This is a companion discussion topic for the original entry at https://www.haiku-os.org/blog/return0e/2019-09-19_nodejs_now_available_in_haiku/
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This is great news! Thank you to everyone that worked on this.

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Although I don’t personally use the JavaScript ecosystem I understand that this is a very important addition to Haiku! Thanks to everyone involved!
Hmm…I do use VisualCode on Linux at work…

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Now if someone can get Rails working on Haiku, that’d be super hot :sunglasses:

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This is fabulous news! Yay!

Has there been any work on bindings so we can create UIs from Node? I believe someone was working on it?

Edit - ignore me - it’s already discussed in the blog post!

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Great!

Can you port https://insomnia.rest/ ?

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No, you’d need to port Electron, which means you’d need to port Chromium as well. That’s a very, very big undertaking.

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This is awesome work!! Thank you and your team!!

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Cool, we can now have as much bloat as everyone else \o/

Seriously though, thanks much, one less on my own TODO list :wink:

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I believe NodeJS is a Firefox build time dependency these days… so I guess that’s one thing off that laundry list of issues before Firefox for Haiku happens. Congrats on reaching this milestone!

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Node is backed by V8. I believe Firefox has its own Javascript engine.

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Nevertheless… it is a Firefox build dependency, a hard requirement at this point. Not not a runtime dependency.

I believe they use it for some sort of instrumentation of the build… as well as using to to wrangle web stuff the ship with firefox. https://mail.mozilla.org/pipermail/firefox-dev/2018-August/006716.html

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I see! That doesn’t make much sense to me - why would you need a competing product to build your own one…?

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I’m pretty sure Mozilla doesn’t see it that way… they just accept Node.js as part of the ecosystem and moved on with using it…

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Congrat and thanks to every one involved. I think this means that some can actually use Haiku @work to put food on the table.

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Great work… very usable…

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Where do we report bugs? Create React App doesn’t work.

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Please report all nodejs bugs and issues to HaikuPorts: https://github.com/haikuports/haikuports/issues

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I will add it.

Edit: added https://github.com/haikuports/haikuports/issues/4196

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Did we ever get the bindings for the UI released?