In this talk, I’ll take you through the journey that led to the creation of node:ffi — an effort that started as an ambitious idea and slowly evolved into a real piece of the Node.js platform. Along the way, I had the chance to explore different approaches to native interoperability, compare ideas with other collaborators in the ecosystem, and learn from a lot of smart and creative solutions that helped shape the direction of the project.

I’ll walk through the technical challenges behind building an FFI layer for Node.js, from ABI compatibility to deep integration with V8, and show how recent advances like Fast API calls finally made high-performance native bindings practical without relying on traditional C++ addons.