A Quine in JavaScript for Node.js

quine.js contains a Node.js program that emits its own source code to stdout.

Invoking

node quine.js | diff -s quine.js -

should confirm that

Files quine.js and - are identical

Notes:

• If you are in a Git Bash on Windows, call "node.exe" instead of "node" since the latter is typically aliased to "winpty node", which is good for interactive use but not for output redirection.

• The program emits LF line breaks. So the file quine.js itself should also use LF rather than CRLF. I hope I got the Git config right to ensure this also on Windows. Otherwise (or if your editor introduces CRLFs) either convert quine.js to LF endings (e.g. with dos2unix quine.js) or use the diff option --strip-trailing-cr to ignore these differences in the line break representation.

• Various JS quines found on the web are expressions or functions emitting or evaluating to their source code. A test invocation must explicitly call that expression or function. In contrast, our quine is a program emitting its own source code.

• Our requirement above (the program emits its own source code) is trivially fulfilled by the empty JS program, which emits nothing. Here I was looking for a non-trivial solution.

• Many JS quines on the web make use of the fact that JS allows to retrieve the source code of a function. This may be considered cheating. Thus the solution here does not rely on Function.prototype.toString.

• I was happy to find a working solution that's even somewhat readable, but more simplifications might be possible. To just make the program shorter, one might remove semicolons and some whitespace and one could use a single-letter identifier instead of bq. But can you find a more substantial simplification?