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What's new in Node 8.0.0

VonRickroll
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Node 8.0.0 is here! Released on May 30th 2017, It enters Node's Long Term Support roadmap and it brings some new interesting features to the table. The complete release note is available on the official Node blog, but let's take a look at the some of the release highlights.


Promisify

APIs with a standard callback style, such as fs.readFile(path, callback) or request(path, callback) can now be wrapped into promises by using util.promisify(). It creates a function that returns a promise.

Promisify

Async Hooks

async_hooks is an experimental module that helps you monitor async operations. You can define hooks for the various stages of an async request's lifecycle. The constructor async_hooks.createHook takes an object as a parameter, which contains a few different callbacks:

// Create a new AsyncHook instance. All of these callbacks are optional.
const asyncHook = async_hooks.createHook({
  init: initCallback,
  before: beforeCallback,
  after: afterCallback,
  destroy: destroyCallback
});
Async Hooks

Read the official documentation for async_hooks. Be aware that async_hooks is a work in progress and "users should take great care when using the experimental new module".


URL parser API

Node 8.0.0 now supports the WHATWG URL standard. This helps you parse and handle URL objects easily. There is an official documentation guide for the WHATWG URL methods, but here are some of them.

URL API

Read the official documentation for the WHATWG URL API.


--pending-deprecation

--pending-deprecation is a new flag that will warn you if your Node program is using features that are pending deprecation. For instance, in Node 8.0.0, the constructor Buffer(num) for the Buffer API (used to create 0-filled Buffer instances) is depreciating. If you continue to use it and launch Node with the --pending-deprecation flag, it will emit a DeprecationWarning warning.

The following snippets runs Node 8.0.0 with the --pending-deprecation flag. Try it out.

Deprecation Warnings

These are the key features in this release but Node 8.0.0 comes with other new features. Have fun checking them out and reading the official release note.

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