Last month, I gave a short intro to Node.js and Red Hat’s involvement in the Node.js project. Today, I am happy to share that the Node.js community is releasing Node.js 16.
As is standard in Node.js releases, this version will not be promoted to long-term support (LTS) until October. We need the greater ecosystem to try it out and give the community feedback. This will allow us to address any issues in advance and make sure both the release, the ecosystem, and our customers are ready when it’s promoted.
In this post, I will highlight some of the new features and ongoing work in the 16 release, which include:
- Updated Platform support
- V8 JavaScript Engine Version 9
- N-API Version 8
- New Promises APIs
- Async Local Storage APIs
Platform Support
As with most major releases, this release updates the minimum supported levels for platforms and tooling used to build Node.js. Some examples include updating the minimum supported Xcode version to 11 and the GCC version for Linux and AIX platforms to 8.3. Please check the documentation in Node’s building instructions for all the latest minimum levels.
More interesting is the work being done to add support for the new Apple M1 architecture. The Red Hat team is active in the Node.js build working group, helping to keep the infrastructure running to support the Power PC and s390 architectures, but also helps with work across the other architectures.
Red Hat’s Ash Cripps, a build work group member for Node.js, has been actively working to install/configure M1 machines so that we can test/build binaries that are compiled for M1 and run natively. Node.js 16 will be the first version to provide native M1 support.
V8 JavaScript Engine Version 9
The V8 JavaScript engine is the runtime environment that executes JavaScript code. It’s what lets JavaScript run across many platforms so developers don’t need to worry about whether their code is running on Linux, Windows, macOS or whether the hardware underneath the OS is x64, Arm, or Power PC. However, V8 is written in C++ and requires the Node community to maintain and improve V8 for assorted operating system and hardware combinations.
Because of this Red Hat Node.js team gets a “sneak peak” at what is coming in new versions of the V8 JavaScript engine. As the platform owners for Power PC and s390 directories within V8 we are hard at work making commits every week to keep V8 running on these platforms. It’s great to see that work pay off as new features come to Node.js. One example this time is ECMAScript RegExp Match indexes. For more info on all of the features check out the V8 blog.
#node #nodejs
