
Node.js 8 Moves into Long-Term Support, Node.js 9 Becomes Current Release Line - styfle
https://medium.com/@nodejs/news-node-js-8-moves-into-long-term-support-and-node-js-9-becomes-the-new-current-release-line-74cf754a10a0
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fivesigma
I was hoping to see v8 6.2 make into the LTS but apparently it will be merged
into a future 8.x release in a few months from now.

v8 6.2 fixes a lot of Turbofan related regressions, for example: for in object
performance [1]

[1] [https://medium.com/the-node-js-collection/get-ready-a-
new-v8...](https://medium.com/the-node-js-collection/get-ready-a-new-v8-is-
coming-node-js-performance-is-changing-46a63d6da4de#1b5b)

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huangbong
Hopefully AWS Lambda adds support for this latest LTS... soon... we need async
await without Babel transpilation.

~~~
koolba
I’ve long banished Babel thanks to Typescript. Still has a transpile step
though much faster and no more plugin hell.

~~~
krainboltgreene
It's faster because it's doing much _less_.

You're just mimicking babel with `babel-preset-typescript` + `babel-transform-
object-rest-spread`, but without support for:

    
    
      - babel-preset-env
      - babel-minification
      - or any of the other dozen or so plugins that make development easier
      - any bug fixes or polyfills
    

I don't get why people think that they're doing something special by not using
babel. Pre-babel life sucked.

~~~
roblabla
For a side-project of mine, I decided to not use babel (or typescript or any
transpilation at all), and I've got to say, post-babel life is awesome. Sure,
you're limited in browser support. But it makes life so much easier, iteration
time so much quicker, and we've got most of the es2015 goodies in browsers
nowadays.

Being able to do the same on the backend side would be nice.

~~~
joshuahutt
If you're not using HMR and you're worried about iteration time, you're
missing the biggest win. The time it takes to transpile a function is
negligible.

[http://matthewlehner.net/react-hot-module-replacement-
with-w...](http://matthewlehner.net/react-hot-module-replacement-with-
webpack/)

~~~
roblabla
You don't need babel to get HMR.

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nailer
I love node 8. `await` and `util.promisify()` has completely changed how I
approach JavaScript.

What a great position JS is in that 'await' is now default in stable server &
build tools and the browser.

Stable Chrome has await top level in the console today too.

Yaay.

~~~
apatheticonion
Do you know if top level await will ever be supported by node?

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scottmf
Relevant discussion: [https://gist.github.com/Rich-
Harris/0b6f317657f5167663b493c7...](https://gist.github.com/Rich-
Harris/0b6f317657f5167663b493c722647221)

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dikaiosune
I'm definitely curious to see if the update to npm 5.5.1 resolves most of the
issues people have seen on the 5.x releases. Otherwise having an LTS release
with a rough release of npm might be pretty painful for a lot of the
ecosystem.

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vacri
How are we nearly a decade into the life of NodeJS and still suffering from
problems with its _package manager_ , which itself is up to version 5.x?

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pcsanwald
package management is a harder problem than most people seem to want to admit.
I've run into tons of issues with every package management system you can
think of: rpm does some extremely dodgy caching stuff at times, navigating
maven dependency trees to identify the offending version of slf4j that is
harshing the vibe, etc.

I can't think of a single package management system that works well and people
seem to love.

~~~
ojanik
Nuget. Can't remember last time i had issues.

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che_shirecat
this is awesome, been looking forward to using async/await in production
node.js without transpilers!

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always_good
You've been able to for a while now.

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wcarron
Server side at least. Not exactly confident that say, a vue-webpack site with
no transpilation will play nicely with everyone's browsers.

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floatboth
The original comment was about "production node.js", not browsers. But
actually [https://caniuse.com/#feat=async-
functions](https://caniuse.com/#feat=async-functions) looks very very good.

~~~
wcarron
My mistake, you are correct.

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Me1000
Great to see Node 8 move to LTS. We’ve gone ahead and made Node 8 the default
version for RunKit.

You can try it out today: [https://npm.runkit.com/try-
node-8](https://npm.runkit.com/try-node-8)

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styfle
It’s great to see the new LTS land on Halloween!

I wrote about Shipping ES Modules[0] if anyone is interested. Or just checkout
the code on GitHub[1].

[0]: [https://hackernoon.com/es6-modules-today-with-
typescript-229...](https://hackernoon.com/es6-modules-today-with-
typescript-22969cd360f0)

[1]: [https://github.com/styfle/copee](https://github.com/styfle/copee)

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racketprogram
WOW, what's different?

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apearson
[https://github.com/nodejs/node/blob/master/doc/changelogs/CH...](https://github.com/nodejs/node/blob/master/doc/changelogs/CHANGELOG_V8.md#2017-10-31-version-890-carbon-
lts-gibfahn)

