Version 14 now becomes the current ‘release’ line with it becoming a LTS (Long Term Support) release in October.
“As per the release schedule (https://github.com/nodejs/Release#release-schedule), Node.js 14 will be the `Current` release for the next 6 months, and then promoted to Long-term Support (LTS) in October 2020”, Michael Dawson and Bethany Griggs said in the official blog post.
In fact both Node.js 12 and Node.js 10 will remain in long-term support until April 2022 and April 2021 respectively.
The highlights in this release include:
- improved diagnostics
- an upgrade of V8
- an experimental Async Local Storage API
- hardening of the streams APIs
- removal of the Experimental Modules warning
- and the removal of some long deprecated APIs.
A quick look on GitHub shows that “Removal of Experimental Modules Warning” is explained very well. EcmaScript Modules (ESM) are one step closer to stable (but not yet). At least Node.js won’t bother you with a warning.
The new version of Node.js also brings the expected V8 upgrade to V8 8.1 🙂
“As always a new version of the V8 JavaScript engine brings performance tweaks and improvements as well as keeping Node.js up with the ongoing improvements in the language and runtime. This time we also have some naming fun with it being version 8 of V8 (“V8 of V8”)”, Michael Dawson and Bethany Griggs wrote in their post.
Highlights of the new JavaScript features include:
- Optional Chaining — MDN
- Nullish Coalescing — MDN
- Intl.DisplayNames — MDN
- Enables calendar and numberingSystem options for Intl.DateTimeFormat — MDN
You can download the latest version here: https://nodejs.org/en/download/current/
If you are curious about all new features in v.14, visit the official Node.js post on Medium.
