Node JS 12 is out there

Where do you get your info when you need to know something new about Node.js?
Is good to be informed and to know when new things come out.
Like a new update, hotfixes, security issues, vulnerabilities, a leaked npm package or a brand new feature?

I'll tell you where I'm getting some information:

1. Medium Node foundation
2. Node js twitter account
3. Beth Griggs - one of the code Node maintainers
4. Michael Dawson - NodeJS community lead

The thing is you will not only know what came out, but you will know why to upgrade.
And at one of the updates, we got event 100% speed increase on backend services responses by simply updating libraries and Node.JS.

So let's see what got out with the last release:

1. V8 Gets an Upgrade: V8 update to V8 7.4 Async stack traces, faster calls with arguments mismatch, faster await and faster script parsing.
2. TLS 1.3 support by default - can be disabled if required. It's a major security step.
3. Switch default http parser to llhttp - Not experimental anymore. Check if you were using http parser in your code before upgrading.
4. Making Native Modules Easier - improving support for this
5. Worker Threads - although an old feature it can be used without flags on runtime
6. Heap Dumps and Diagnostics Report - not required to use 3rd party libs anymore and you can diagnose your app without changing production code.
7. Speed at startup - Node 12 generates the code cache for built-in libraries in advance at build time. This gives a ~30% speedup in startup time for the main thread.
8. New compiler and platform minimums - the codebase now requires a minimum of GCC 6 and glibc 2.17 on platforms other than macOS and Windows.

Windows minimums remain the same as Node.js 11, requiring at least Windows 7, 2008 R2 or 2012 R2 and a minimum compiler of Visual Studio 2017. macOS users needing to compile Node.js will require a minimum of Xcode 8 and Node.js binaries made available on nodejs.org will only support a minimum of macOS 10.10 “Yosemite”.

Further details are available in the Node.js BUILDING.md.

Got inspiration from this article

Article was first published on Appseed.us blog:
https://blog.appseed.us/node-js-12-is-out-there/