pkg VS bytenode

You don't even need that: https://github.com/vercel/pkg.

I think there are equivalents in the Python ecosystem.

Another exciting feature is the ability to build a single-executable Node.js binary. Before Node.js v18, the only way to build a Node.js binary was to use a third-party package, like pkg.

As a comparison I am using https://github.com/vercel/pkg to package my Node.js app into an exe file. Vercel-pkg allows me to build different images for different platforms like Windows, Linux, Mac. It would be nice if it could produce a single .exe that worked on all platforms. But I guess such an exe would have to be bigger. It is not too cumbersome to produce one exe per platform that my users need.

To run NodeJS as a sidecar we need to pack it into binary. Taurine is bundling your server code and preparing it for packing into a single binary. Using Vercel’s pkg CLI tool we can compile it into a single executable binary. That binary is running with the Tauri application.

What if you packaged the whole thing into one executable using pkg?

In addition to the other responses, there are node packages like pkg and nexe that you can use to package the node executable and your code into a single executable.

Not really, at last check it just bundles the entire .Net runtime with the compiled image. It's basically the equivalent of https://github.com/vercel/pkg or similar tools.

You can even pack your terminal application in a single binary that does not require separate NodeJS installed via pkg.

electron-vite inspired by bytenode, the specific implementation:

It doesn't appear that there is any performance penalty to using Bytenode. There are some benchmark functions in the repository, but certainly more work could be done to test. My gut feeling is that the minor overhead of loading the binary is balanced out by the minor speed increase by giving V8 a pre-compiled file.

There's an NPM package called bytenode which compiles your JavaScript to V8 bytecode.