Programming Tutorials

  For years, Jest has been the default standard for testing in the JavaScript ecosystem. It is powerful, feature-rich, and essentially defined the "Developer Experience" for modern testing. However, that convenience comes at a significant cost: performance overhead and massive dependency trees. As CI pipelines slow down and  node_modules  folders swell into the hundreds of megabytes, developers are looking for leaner alternatives. With the release of Node.js 20, the native  node:test  module became stable. It offers a standardized, zero-dependency way to run tests with performance that often outperforms Jest by an order of magnitude. This guide details the architectural differences between the two, provides a rigorous migration path, and offers production-ready code examples for replacing Jest in a modern TypeScript environment. The Root Cause: Why is Jest So Heavy? To understand why migrating is valuable, we must analyze why Jest behaves the way it does. Jest i...