Nice post! There's a lot of stuff here that I had no idea was in built-in already.
I tried making a standalone executable with the command provided, but it produced a .blob which I believe still requires the Node runtime to run. I was able to make a true executable with postject per the Node docs[1], but a simple Hello World resulted in a 110 MB binary. This is probably a drawback worth mentioning.
Also, seeing those arbitrary timeout limits I can't help but think of the guy in Antarctica who had major headaches about hardcoded timeouts.[2]
I have a blog post[1] and accompanying repo[2] that shows how to use SEA to build a binary (and compares it to bun and deno) and strip it down to 67mb (for me, depends on the size of your local node binary).
It's not insane at all. Any binary that gets packed with the entire runtime will be in MBs. But that's the point, the end user downloads a standalone fragment and doesn't need to give a flying fuck about what kind of garbage has to be preinstalled for the damn binary to work. You think people care if a binary is 5MB or 50MB in 2025? It's more insane that you think it's insane than it is actually insane. Reminds me of all the Membros and Perfbros crying about Electron apps and meanwhile these things going brrrrrrr with 100MB+ binaries and 1GB+ eaten memory on untold millions of average computers
The fact that it’s normalized to use obscene amounts of memory for tiny apps should not be celebrated.
I assure you, at scale this belief makes infra fall apart, and I’ve seen it happen so, so many times. Web devs who have never thought about performance merrily chuck huge JSON blobs or serialized app models into the DB, keep clicking scale up when it gets awful, and then when that finally doesn’t work, someone who _does_ care gets hired to fix it. Except that person or team now has to not only fix years of accumulated cruft, but also has to change a deeply embedded culture, and fight for dev time against Product.
The difference is dotnet is both a much more feature complete runtime and a much more performant one. Its not like you're getting all too much with that node runtime - it was, and still is although to a lesser extent, pretty bare-bones.
Yeah, many people here are saying this is AI written. Possibly entirely.
It says: "You can now bundle your Node.js application into a single executable file", but doesn't actually provide the command to create the binary. Something like:
I tried making a standalone executable with the command provided, but it produced a .blob which I believe still requires the Node runtime to run. I was able to make a true executable with postject per the Node docs[1], but a simple Hello World resulted in a 110 MB binary. This is probably a drawback worth mentioning.
Also, seeing those arbitrary timeout limits I can't help but think of the guy in Antarctica who had major headaches about hardcoded timeouts.[2]
[1]: https://nodejs.org/api/single-executable-applications.html
[2]: https://brr.fyi/posts/engineering-for-slow-internet