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Express has the ecosystem, Fastify has the schema validation, and Hono runs everywhere. Here's the practical breakdown of all three so you can actually make the call.

Measured: pnpm cut three projects' node_modules from 132 MB to 42 MB and blocked a phantom import npm let through. The real difference is what that single architectural choice compounds into at scale.

Here's a scenario I see in almost every codebase I review. A developer writes an async function that reads some state, does a bit of work, then writes back a result. In tests, it's fine. In development, it's fine.

Your Node.js server calls res.send("hello") and somewhere, 1400 bytes cross the planet in 80 milliseconds and appear correctly in a browser. That's wild. But what actually happens?

Bun is faster where the runtime layer is the bottleneck — startup, installs — and irrelevant where your database is. And the "native addons don't work" objection is out of date: Bun implements ~95% of N-API. How to make the call without repeating anyone's unsourced benchmark.

Node.js is single-threaded — but Worker Threads let you move CPU-heavy tasks off the event loop so your server stays responsive under real load.

Build Node.js's EventEmitter from scratch in 100 lines. Learn why listener removal requires saved references, how once() wraps callbacks, and what that MaxListenersExceededWarning actually means.