Ask HN: Is Express still "de-facto" for building Node back ends?

I used to do more node work, and that was mostly pre v4. Express was the go-to.

There’s more options out there now. I did a bit of research a few years back, and my go-to now is Fastify.

https://fastify.dev/

It's still the most popular but for the past couple of years it hasn't seen any major updates and some people question if the project is abandoned.

I switched to Fastify and haven't looked back.

It seems like it. There are alternatives like Koa and Fastify, but none of seem to strike quite the balance that express does. I pray that one day express 5 will get released and they’ll finally fix the whole async middleware not handling errors properly thing though. That’s gotta be one of the most annoying quirks that has just been quietly sitting there untouched for years at this point. Maybe one day.

I guess there’s Bun and Elysia now too, but that’s pretty bleeding edge by comparison.

Yes it is, Bun is promising but still in early stage. If you're looking for a battle-tested framework I would suggest Nest.js, which supports both Express and Fastify in a virtually transparent way.

Fastify is absolutely fantastic. It has the concept of "type providers", allowing you to pair it with fastify-type-provider-json-schema-to-ts (for JSON schemas) or another typing system of choice, such as Zod, to obtain strongly typed queries, request bodies, and responses in handlers with TS types derived on the fly at compile time. It also validates data returned from handlers to conform to schemas, reducing the likelihood of accidentally leaking sensitive information. And it's faster than Express, even with validation.