Stop using expressjs in 2023

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Style Pass

2024-02-10 08:00:05

Express is the most popular web framework for nodejs, It is downloaded 10s of millions of times each week. It was started within a year of nodejs launch and has always been a de-facto choice to build a server. it has a really simple and easy to reason about API, is stable and performs well. It has inspired web frameworks like fiber and tide because of its popularity and API simplicity.

To understand this we have to get into its history. The latest Express version is v4.18.2 and v4.0.0 was released in 2014, so in last 9 years no new major version has been released. There have been several efforts to release Express 5.0 but that never materialised. So it's safe to assume Express 5.0 will never see the light of day.

Express does not support Javascript promises. In 2014 when Expess 4.0.0 was released Promises had not landed in ECMAScript spec nor in nodejs. Express embraced callbacks for all async work.

everything seems to be working fine, But there is a big issue here. If the async code throws errors unhandled exception is thrown.