Node.js 13 has been released with upgrades to V8 and new features including diagnostic reporting. Node.js 12 was moved to long term support at the same time.

Announcing the new release Michael Dawson, Node.js community lead at IBM, said users should bear in mind that Node.js 8 reaches end-of-life in December, so you should be planning your migration to either 10 or 12. The Node.js version 13 release won’t be promoted to LTS so it isn’t recommend for production use, rather for building and testing with to make sure your code is keeping up with the way Node.js, the asynchronous event driven JavaScript runtime built on Chrome's V8 JavaScript engine which uses an event-driven, non-blocking I/O model, is moving. 

Node.js includes an updated version of the JavaScript engine, V8 7.8. The developers say it has improvements in size and speed, and that they are planning on updating Node.js to include V8 7.9 as soon as is possible.

The main additions to the new release are the enabling by default of full International Components for Unicode (ICU), and a stable version of the Workers API. ICU was already supported in earlier releases so that you can write code that can support users in multiple languages and locales. Until this version, only English was enabled by default so you had to get and enable support for any other languages you wanted to target. 

The stable version of the Workers API was backported to Node.js 12, but this is the first release it's been in from the start. It means that Worker Threads are now a stable feature in both Node.js 12 and 13. The worker threads module enables the use of threads that execute JavaScript in parallel, which is useful in CPU-intensive JavaScript operations.

Alongside the new features, for those contributing to Node.js this release works better with Python 3 for building Node.js.
Systems that have Python 2 and Python 3 installed will still use Python 2, but systems with only Python 3 should now be able to build using Python 3. 

• Ian Elliot is the author of  Just JavaScript: An Idiomatic Approach; JavaScript Async; Just jQuery: The Core UI and Just jQuery: Events, Async & AJAX which are part of the I Programmer Library published by I/O Press.

More Information

Node.js 13 just landed and Node 12 is promoted to LTS

Node.js Foundation Homepage

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