In this volume of Need to Node, you can find the latest updates on the Node v12.5.0 (current) release, as well as on V8 release v7.6, a Q&A session of the OpenJS Board election, highlights from NodeConf Colombia, and more!

Check this week’s Need to Node to keep up to date with the latest news in Node.js project, events, and awesome articles. You are always welcome to collaborate and participate!

What’s New in the Node.js Project

• Node v12.5.0 (Current) Released the most notable changes in this release include:
  • Startup time is reduced by enabling V8 snapshots by default
  • The --inspect-publish-uid flag was added to specify ways of the inspector web socket url exposure
  • Accessors on napi_define_* are now ECMAScript-compliant
  • CPU info has been added to report output
  • Introduced MSVS 2019
  • worker.terminate() now returns a promise and using the callback is deprecated
• V8 release v7.6 a new release that will head to Chrome 76 and future versions of Node.js. This time, the heavily used JSON.parse gets some significant performance improvements, BigInt now has better API support, introduction of Promise.allSettled, and more.
• You can participate in the Q&A session of the OpenJS Board election for the Node.js project. This time, you can ask two Node.js experts James Snell and Michael Dawson.
• There is an ongoing discussion about merging content from nodejs/website-redesign and nodejs/nodejs.dev (and archiving the former). The separation of concerns is good in theory, but in practice has turned out to be premature optimization, causing confusion and management overhead.
• There is an issue in the Security Working Group for publicizing information about packages using deprecated/insecure buffer APIs.

Awesome Articles, Links, and Resources

• If you weren’t able to attend NodeConf Colombia last week, don’t worry, you can see the highlights of the conference here - by Liz Parody
• The cost of JavaScript in 2019 In 2019, the dominant costs of processing scripts are now download and CPU execution time. Optimizing bottlenecks with script execution time and network can be impactful. Check out this blog post for more info!
• Analysis of an Exploited NPM Package. A talk about the event-stream security vulnerability, how it happened, how the vulnerability worked, and how to mitigate similar problems in future - by Jarrod Overson
• npm 6.9.1 released (after long delay) - by Isaac Z. Schlueter.
• Speaking of npm, it’s been reported that CEO Bryan Bogensberger has confirmed that the company’s funding has been secured until 2020
• Execa 2 release — process execution for humans
• Debugging Javascript Like a Pro there are more options than console.log() - by Giancarlo Buomprisco
• Understanding JavaScript Hoisting - by Krissanawat Kaewsanmuang

One Last Thing...

If you find any awesome Node.js or JavaScript things over the next week (or beyond!), never hesitate to reach out to us on Twitter at @NodeSource to share and get it included in Need to Node - our DMs are open if you don’t want to share publicly!