RFC: Which structured logger should we adopt? (pino vs winston)

[mighty840]

We currently use raw console.* calls throughout the server package (see issue #14). We want to replace them with a proper structured logger.

The two main candidates are:

Option A: pino

• Extremely fast (low overhead, JSON-first)
• Built for Node.js production workloads
• pino-pretty for dev-friendly output
• Lightweight (~1MB)

Option B: winston

• Most popular Node.js logger
• Multiple transports (file, console, HTTP, etc.)
• More flexible formatting
• Larger ecosystem of plugins

What we need

• JSON structured logs for production
• Human-readable output for development
• Log levels (debug, info, warn, error)
• Request context (request ID, user ID) would be nice but not required initially

Which do you prefer and why? Or is there another option we should consider?