A COMPREHENSIVE GUIDE TO NODE.JS ADDONS

Summary from the TLDR Web Dev newsletter

Node.js addons are dynamic libraries written in C, C++, or Rust that enhance Node.js applications by providing access to system-level resources, improving performance, and integrating external native libraries with JavaScript code. They are useful for performance-critical tasks, interacting with hardware, and utilizing existing native libraries. These addons work by using the Node-API (N-API) to expose native functions to JavaScript, which are compiled into a binary file (.node) and loaded into the Node.js application.