The first version of the JavaScript runtime to ship with pre-built binaries for Apple Silicon also features Google V8 9.0 and timer functions that return Promises.

Node.js 16 was released on April 20, adding Apple Silicon binaries and additional stable APIs to the popular JavaScript runtime.

The release is the first to ship with prebuilt binaries for  Apple Silicon. While Node.js will provide separate tarballs for the Intel and Arm architectures, the MacOS installer will be shipped as a “fat” (multi-architecture) binary. Node.js 16 follows the October 2020 release of  Node.js 15.

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Other new features and improvements in Node.js 16:

• The Timers Promises API is stable, providing an alternative set of timer functions that return Promise objects, removing the need to use util.promisify().
• The  Google V8 9.0 JavaScript/WebAssembly engine serves as the underpinning of Node.js 16, upgraded from V8 8.6 in  Node.js 15. The upgrade features the ECMAScript RegExp Match Indices, which provide the start and end indices of the captured string.
• Features produced as part of recent Node.js 15 releases that are now in Node.js 16 include Node-API version 8, Stable Source Maps v3, and web platform atob (buffer.atob(data)) and btoa (buffer.btoa(data)) implementations for compatibility with legacy web platform APIs.
• Notable deprecations include the runtime deprecation of access to process.binding() for a number of core modules, such as process.binding(‘http_parser’).

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