3.0 KiB
title: Node.js and the Road Ahead date: Thu Jan 16 15:00:00 PST 2014 author: Timothy J Fontaine slug: nodejs-road-ahead
As the new project lead for Node.js I am excited for our future, and want to give you an update on where we are.
One of Node's major goals is to provide a small core, one that provides the right amount of surface area for consumers to achieve and innovate, without Node itself getting in the way. That ethos is alive and well, we're going to continue to provide a small, simple, and stable set of APIs that facilitate the amazing uses the community finds for Node. We're going to keep providing backward compatible APIs, so code you write today will continue to work on future versions of Node. And of course, performance tuning and bug fixing will always be an important part of every release cycle.
The release of Node v0.12 is imminent, and a lot of significant work has gone into this release. There's streams3, a better keep alive agent for http, the vm module is now based on contextify, and significant performance work done in core features (Buffers, TLS, streams). We have a few APIs that are still being ironed out before we can feature freeze and branch (execSync, AsyncListeners, user definable instrumentation). We are definitely in the home stretch.
But Node is far from done. In the short term there will be new releases of v8 that we'll need to track, as well as integrating the new ABI stable C module interface. There are interesting language features that we can use to extend Node APIs (extend not replace). We need to write more tooling, we need to expose more interfaces to further enable innovation. We can explore functionality to embed Node in your existing project.
The list can go on and on. Yet, Node is larger than the software itself. Node is also the community, the businesses, the ecosystems, and their related events. With that in mind there are things we can work to improve.
The core team will be improving its procedures such that we can quickly and efficiently communicate with you. We want to provide high quality and timely responses to issues, describe our development roadmap, as well as provide our progress during each release cycle. We know you're interested in our plans for Node, and it's important we're able to provide that information. Communication should be bidirectional: we want to continue to receive feedback about how you're using Node, and what your pain points are.
After the release of v0.12 we will facilitate the community to contribute and curate content for nodejs.org. Allowing the community to continue to invest in Node will ensure nodejs.org is an excellent starting point and the primary resource for tutorials, documentation, and materials regarding Node. We have an awesome and engaged community, and they're paramount to our success.
I'm excited for Node's future, to see new and interesting use cases, and to continue to help businesses scale and innovate with Node. We have a lot we can accomplish together, and I look forward to seeing those results.