[dirkc]

You would think that sending HTTP requests is a basic capability, but I've had fun in many languages doing so. Long ago (2020, or not so long ago, depending on how you look at it) I was surprised that doing an HTTP request on node using no dependencies was a little awkward:

  const response = await new Promise( (resolve, reject) => {
    const req = https.request(url, {
    }, res => {
      let body = "";
      res.on("data", data => {
        body += data;
      });
      res.on('end', () => {
        resolve(body);
      });
    });
    req.end();
  });

[wging]

These days node supports the fetch API, which is much simpler. (It wasn't there in 2020, it seems to have been added around 2022-2023.)

[dirkc]

Yes, thankfully! It's amusing to read what they say about fetch on nodejs.org [1]:

> Undici is an HTTP client library that powers the fetch API in Node.js. It was written from scratch and does not rely on the built-in HTTP client in Node.js. It includes a number of features that make it a good choice for high-performance applications.

[1] - https://nodejs.org/en/learn/getting-started/fetch

[Pay08]

Why is it amusing?

[dirkc]

I say amusing because it points out that something I (and many other people) assume to be basic clearly has a lot more nuance to it.

[b450]

Note that node-fetch will silently ignore any overrides to "forbidden" request headers like Host, since it's designed for parity with fetch behavior in the browser. This caused a minor debugging headache for me once.

[rzmmm]

Web standards have rich support for incremental/chunked payloads, the original node APIs are designed around it. From this lens the Node APIs make sense.

[simlevesque]

And you don't handle errors at all...

[niekiepriekie]

It's node. Why do errors if you can simply ignore them.

[dirkc]

Left as an exercise for the reader... ;p