Nodejs

Node.js is an open-source, cross-platform JavaScript runtime environment that executes JavaScript code outside of a web browser. Built on the V8 JavaScript engine from Chromium, Node.js enables developers to use JavaScript for server-side scripting and to build scalable network applications.

Core features include non-blocking, event-driven input/output and a lightweight thread model. The runtime uses a single-threaded event loop (with optional worker threads) to handle many connections concurrently, making it well suited for I/O-heavy applications such as web servers and real-time services.

Node.js provides a rich standard library and access to system resources through modules. It relies on libuv for asynchronous I/O and encapsulates its module system with CommonJS (and increasingly ESM). The npm package manager, bundled with most installations, hosts a vast ecosystem of packages.

Ecosystem and usage: Node.js is commonly used to build web servers and APIs with frameworks like Express, Koa, and NestJS. It is also used for real-time applications (chat, collaboration), microservices, data processing pipelines, and serverless functions. It can be used with front-end development to unify language on the client and server.

History and governance: Node.js was created by Ryan Dahl and released in 2009 to bring JavaScript to server-side development. It is maintained by the OpenJS Foundation and a community of contributors, with Active Long-Term Support (LTS) lines.

Compatibility and considerations: Node.js runs on Windows, macOS, and Linux. It is designed for JavaScript on the server and is not a browser environment. Because the event loop is single-threaded, CPU-bound tasks can block execution; patterns such as clustering or worker threads can mitigate this.

Licensing: The Node.js runtime is distributed under the MIT license, while individual packages in the npm ecosystem may use various licenses.