Colin here, creator of Nub. I’ve had the general shape of this in mind for years. Nub runs your code with stock `node`, augmented with a `--require` preload hook[0] that adds a transpiler (oxc-powered, packaged as a Node-API add-on), registers a module resolution hook[1], and injects polyfills as needed for APIs like `Worker`, `Temporal`, etc. All purely additive, your code ultimately runs using Node’s actual engine & stdlib implementations.
I saw this on twitter and loved it, such a good move on your part Colin. Hope the project picks up tons of steam!
eyelidlessness•Jun 24, 2026
I’m surprised to see this using a `--require` hook (rather than `--import`). Maybe something’s changed significantly since I was looking into building some similar functionality… but it makes me wonder about nuances in nub’s ESM support.
(When I was investigating this it was very early in Node’s `--import` story, but there were several edge cases with the more common ESM-to-CJS approaches that I wanted to address. Most were probably exceedingly niche concerns, but I’d expect top-level await to affect a meaningful subset of users.)
colinmcd•Jun 24, 2026
We use this to register our preload purely for performance reasons. In this and many other cases CommonJS is still faster than ESM. Using --require is about 0.5ms overhead vs 4.6ms for --import (on my M1 Macbook Pro).
Relatedly Node.js recently (2025) introduced a synchronous version of its resolver hook registration API (`module.registerHooks()`) specifically to improve performance over the old async `module.register()` API. It was a big unblocker for Nub. For the interested, the async API added 19ms fixed registration overhead + about 130us additional overhead per import.
Which flag Nub uses here doesn't impact userland at all, TLA is supported wherever it's supported by Node.js itself.
ssalbdivad•Jun 24, 2026
Just merged a PR migrating our entire monorepo to nub.
0 issues, ridiculously fast.
daavin•Jun 24, 2026
You merged a PR migrating a shared monorepo using this within an hour of it being posted?
colinmcd•Jun 24, 2026
It entered public beta last week, but just getting on HN now.
bookernath•Jun 24, 2026
Nice, I think this fills a niche. Does it work on cloudflare workers?
colinmcd•Jun 24, 2026
Cloudflare Workers is a different runtime and has its own toolchain around it. Nub could theoretically support it when executing files (spawn `wrangler dev` instead of `node` if wrangler.toml is detected or something) but really I'm focused on making the Node.js experience as good as possible.
The other pieces of the toolkit could absolutely be used: package manager, script runner, package runner. Works with anything that implements the Node module resolution algorithm (actually Yarn PnP also works out of the box...).
GL26•Jun 24, 2026
nice ! does this work on docker containers ?
colinmcd•Jun 24, 2026
Yep, full support on macOS, Linux, Windows. No official image yet (I'll start on this now) but you can get started with something like this.
FROM node:26-slim
RUN npm i -g @nubjs/nub
Works with any Node version down to 18.19 but recommend 22.15+ for best performance (that's when synchronous registerHooks was introduced[0])
I didn't even click on the link. I just came to give the author a hat-tip on the project name. Well played.
colinmcd•Jun 24, 2026
Thanks :) Highly recommend clicking the link too!
gorjusborg•Jun 24, 2026
Very smart. You can't lose all your customers for vibe-coding a migration to Rust if you are already written in Rust ;)
Zambyte•Jun 24, 2026
They'll get bought out by OpenAI and convert the project to Zig
airstrike•Jun 24, 2026
huh, is OpenAI embracing Zig specifically? TIL
allthetime•Jun 24, 2026
It’s a joke about how Anthropic bought bun and then rewrote bun from zig to rust with a giant one week vibe code. The joke hinges on the fact that this would be the opposite (OpenAI, nub, rust to zig)
airstrike•Jun 24, 2026
oh LOL I'm slow today ig
lacoolj•Jun 24, 2026
It also helps if you're already vibe-coded and don't have customers to begin with
skrebbel•Jun 24, 2026
Bun had customers?
ivanjermakov•Jun 24, 2026
Respect for embracing existing tech instead of rewriting a worse version of it. Wonder where we would be today if all alternative-building effort went to Node instead (with proper leadership).
hungryhobbit•Jun 24, 2026
Fundamentally you can't fix a lot of things with this approach.
Simple example: Node is the only serious OSS software I know of that has no way to document its config (in the config file itself). It's moronic! The Node people just adopted JSON without a thought, and then refused to consider any alternatives (even "JSON with comments").
When an organization digs into bad decisions, the only way to fix them is to start something new. The entire JS ecosystem will never have documentation on its config as long as everyone keeps building on top of Node.
(And there are many other issues like this in the Node ecosystem; the utter absurdity of not being able to document config is just my personal pet peeve.)
johnfn•Jun 24, 2026
> Simple example: Node is the only serious OSS software I know of that has no way to document its config (in the config file itself). It's moronic! The Node people just adopted JSON without a thought, and then refused to consider any alternatives (even "JSON with comments").
Tangential but this also drives me absolutely nuts. If I have to see `"//": "some comment"` one more time I'm gonna lose it.
johnfn•Jun 24, 2026
You might remember the io.js fork of Node.js back in 2014. Node was stagnating, a bunch of people forked it into io.js, which eventually got merged back into Node and got it back on track. Or, going further back, CoffeeScript, a "fork" of JS that had its best ideas adopted back into ES5.
A small scrappy team can prove out a good idea because failure is not a catastrophic risk to them. In short, forks are part of a healthy ecosystem.
hootz•Jun 24, 2026
It is still happening, a lot of things are still being adopted by Node after being available on other runtimes. They aren't forks, but they still provide pressure towards progress.
kandros•Jun 24, 2026
Love the idea, learning a lot of interesting things about node hooks by reading docs and some code
montroser•Jun 24, 2026
Nice. Can we get `nub --compile` up in there like Bun has?
colinmcd•Jun 24, 2026
Coming very soon!
allthetime•Jun 24, 2026
I will seriously consider migrating once this exists! I couldn’t imagine deploying any other way now. I can never go back from SCPing a single binary to my server and just hitting reset on the service.
I’m wondering how that works. Deno has very complicated import resolution, so building my own import resolver to be compatible with it is a bit of a pain. (This is for a custom lint-like tool.)
10 Comments
[0] https://nodejs.org/api/cli.html#-require-module
[1] https://nodejs.org/api/module.html#moduleregisterhooksoption...
(When I was investigating this it was very early in Node’s `--import` story, but there were several edge cases with the more common ESM-to-CJS approaches that I wanted to address. Most were probably exceedingly niche concerns, but I’d expect top-level await to affect a meaningful subset of users.)
Relatedly Node.js recently (2025) introduced a synchronous version of its resolver hook registration API (`module.registerHooks()`) specifically to improve performance over the old async `module.register()` API. It was a big unblocker for Nub. For the interested, the async API added 19ms fixed registration overhead + about 130us additional overhead per import.
Which flag Nub uses here doesn't impact userland at all, TLA is supported wherever it's supported by Node.js itself.
0 issues, ridiculously fast.
The other pieces of the toolkit could absolutely be used: package manager, script runner, package runner. Works with anything that implements the Node module resolution algorithm (actually Yarn PnP also works out of the box...).
[0] https://nodejs.org/api/module.html#moduleregisterhooksoption...
Simple example: Node is the only serious OSS software I know of that has no way to document its config (in the config file itself). It's moronic! The Node people just adopted JSON without a thought, and then refused to consider any alternatives (even "JSON with comments").
When an organization digs into bad decisions, the only way to fix them is to start something new. The entire JS ecosystem will never have documentation on its config as long as everyone keeps building on top of Node.
(And there are many other issues like this in the Node ecosystem; the utter absurdity of not being able to document config is just my personal pet peeve.)
Tangential but this also drives me absolutely nuts. If I have to see `"//": "some comment"` one more time I'm gonna lose it.
A small scrappy team can prove out a good idea because failure is not a catastrophic risk to them. In short, forks are part of a healthy ecosystem.
I’m wondering how that works. Deno has very complicated import resolution, so building my own import resolver to be compatible with it is a bit of a pain. (This is for a custom lint-like tool.)