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Fetch API has landed into Node.js

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Re: Fetch API has landed into Node.js

#31

Post by dstroot »

inglor wrote: post #24
mcraiha wrote: post #15

Why it took so long? e.g. Deno had fetch support for ages

Basically because fetch isn't a great API for servers it took a while to get consensus on actually landing it for the interoprability/simple API value. Then it took a while to get consensus it's fine to do even if we can't implement the standard fully and diverge from it on stuff like CORS (like Deno does). Then there were a bunch of work adding APIs like `EventTarget` and `AbortSignal` to Node.js which are quirky'is…

First, this is awesome and congratulations! Second this sounds like a lot of work! Can you comment why was it so hard to add fetch to node, yet packages like “node-fetch” have existed for some time and seem to implement fetch rather easily? Only asking from a curiosity perspective.

Re: Fetch API has landed into Node.js

#32

Post by oefrha »

staticelf wrote: post #25
inglor wrote: post #4

Hey, Node core person here (and the person who triggered the land) - we're super excited for this and would love help and feedback. This is still experimental and we'd love to hear from the community what you'd like to see.

Quick question, judging from the commit alone this seems like a rather small change. I assume there's more to it though. I just wonder how come features like this that kind of seems obvious to include in the ecosystem takes quite some time to land? I understand the reality is more complex perhaps, so I am genuinely curious. I hope you realize no disrespect, this will greatly improve the daily work for me since I use…

Adding 8k lines is hardly a small change.

Re: Fetch API has landed into Node.js

#33

Post by inglor »

staticelf wrote: post #25
inglor wrote: post #4

Hey, Node core person here (and the person who triggered the land) - we're super excited for this and would love help and feedback. This is still experimental and we'd love to hear from the community what you'd like to see.

Quick question, judging from the commit alone this seems like a rather small change. I assume there's more to it though. I just wonder how come features like this that kind of seems obvious to include in the ecosystem takes quite some time to land? I understand the reality is more complex perhaps, so I am genuinely curious. I hope you realize no disrespect, this will greatly improve the daily work for me since I use…

The commit adds undici (another Node.js project at https://github.com/nodejs/undici ) as a dependency and exposes its `fetch` - the code changes you see are probably just adding a flag :)

> I just wonder how come features like this that kind of seems obvious to include in the ecosystem takes quite some time to land?

I answered that below (check it out) but note how expensive adding a bad API is vs. asking people for one more `npm install` :) There is more discussion in https://github.com/nodejs/node/issues/19393 and in https://docs.google.com/document/d/1tn_-0S_FG_sla81wFohi8Sc8... a discussion from 2018 we had on it

Re: Fetch API has landed into Node.js

#34

Post by pilif »

staticelf wrote: post #25
inglor wrote: post #4

Hey, Node core person here (and the person who triggered the land) - we're super excited for this and would love help and feedback. This is still experimental and we'd love to hear from the community what you'd like to see.

Quick question, judging from the commit alone this seems like a rather small change. I assume there's more to it though. I just wonder how come features like this that kind of seems obvious to include in the ecosystem takes quite some time to land? I understand the reality is more complex perhaps, so I am genuinely curious. I hope you realize no disrespect, this will greatly improve the daily work for me since I use…

my guess is that this adds stuff to the global object which has backwards compatibility concerns.

And with every public API: Once you add it, you can't really hope to ever change it and even bug-fixes could be breaking some user's code (because they relied on the bug), so you have to be very careful to ship your public API as bug-free as possible.

Re: Fetch API has landed into Node.js

#35

Post by tbarbugli »

inglor wrote: post #4

Hey, Node core person here (and the person who triggered the land) - we're super excited for this and would love help and feedback. This is still experimental and we'd love to hear from the community what you'd like to see.

yes, yes, yes.

This was a huge pain for us. We develop an SDK that needs to work on Node, browsers and React Native.

I am super happy to hear about this :)

Re: Fetch API has landed into Node.js

#36

Post by inglor »

songzme wrote: post #30

sorry if this is a stupid question, but how do I try this out? I ran node with the experimental flag on a file that calls fetch: node server.js --experimental-fetch Got 'fetch is not defined' reference error.

First: not a stupid question - the release cadence, multiple release lines and other minutia of a project like Node are not something I'd expect users to be intimately familiar with!

This _just landed today_. You can get it by building from master:

```

# there is more details in building.md

git clone https://github.com/nodejs/node

cd node

# may need to pass --openssl-no-asm

./configure

make -j12

./out/Release/node --experimental-fetch

```

Otherwise - wait a bit for the next v17 release to land per the normal release cycle :)

Re: Fetch API has landed into Node.js

#37

Post by songzme »

inglor wrote: post #36
songzme wrote: post #30

sorry if this is a stupid question, but how do I try this out? I ran node with the experimental flag on a file that calls fetch: node server.js --experimental-fetch Got 'fetch is not defined' reference error.

First: not a stupid question - the release cadence, multiple release lines and other minutia of a project like Node are not something I'd expect users to be intimately familiar with! This _just landed today_. You can get it by building from master: ``` # there is more details in building.md git clone https://github.com/nodejs/node cd node # may need to pass --openssl-no-asm ./configure make -j12 ./out/Release/node --…

oh I see so when node v17.4.1 is released, I would be able to run

node server.js --experimental-fetch

Re: Fetch API has landed into Node.js

#38

Post by mccorrinall »

inglor wrote: post #21
nefitty wrote: post #14

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Hey this one change is going to positively impact my day to day life. Just wanted to let you know. Thanks for sharing your hard work and time.

I'm happy to hear that but I had a very small part in it all! The person who took it through the finish line (and deserves the most props here IMO) is Michael https://github.com/targos The people who worked most on Undici are Matteo https://github.com/mcollina and Robert https://github.com/ronag The person to work most on fetch in Undici is Ethan https://github.com/Ethan-Arrowood Also worth calling our James whose wo…

What does undici mean?

Re: Fetch API has landed into Node.js

#39

Post by inglor »

rattray wrote: post #28
arcatek wrote: post #23

Earlier quoted context omitted.

However note that ESM in Node comes with drawbacks that prevent end-users from relying them in various situations. Those will be mostly solved once loaders become stable, but until then it's still advised to ship packages as both CJS and ESM.

How do you do both?

It's very easy to re-export ESM (import) as CJS (require) and vice-versa. The main issue is that ESM by default

For example to use `require` inside ESModules you would do:

```mjs import { createRequire } from 'module'; const require = createRequire(import.meta.url); require('./whatever-in-cjs'); ```

There is a reason this isn't "by default" though since ESM doesn't "silently" interop with CJS to not make writing universal code harder.

Re: Fetch API has landed into Node.js

#40

Post by staticelf »

inglor wrote: post #33
staticelf wrote: post #25

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Quick question, judging from the commit alone this seems like a rather small change. I assume there's more to it though. I just wonder how come features like this that kind of seems obvious to include in the ecosystem takes quite some time to land? I understand the reality is more complex perhaps, so I am genuinely curious. I hope you realize no disrespect, this will greatly improve the daily work for me since I use…

The commit adds undici (another Node.js project at https://github.com/nodejs/undici ) as a dependency and exposes its `fetch` - the code changes you see are probably just adding a flag :) > I just wonder how come features like this that kind of seems obvious to include in the ecosystem takes quite some time to land? I answered that below (check it out) but note how expensive adding a bad API is vs. asking people for…

Ok cool and thanks for the clarification, I imagined it was more to the topic than I realized.

Last question I have is will this be included in the next version of the LTS version or how do experimental features usually progress for someone who are unfamiliar?

Can't wait until I can use fetch in my codebase without any additional dependencies!

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