Node.js — Weekly Update - Apr 3rd, 2015

Giovanny Gioyik

io.js 1.6.3 release

This week we had one io.js release v1.6.3, complete changelog can be found on GitHub.

fs: corruption can be caused by fs.writeFileSync() and append-mode fs.writeFile() and fs.writeFileSync() under certain circumstances, reported in #1058, fixed in #1063 (Olov Lassus).
iojs: an "internal modules" API has been introduced to allow core code to share JavaScript modules internally only without having to expose them as a public API, this feature is for core-only #848 (Vladimir Kurchatkin).
timers: two minor problems with timers have been fixed:
- Timer#close() is now properly idempotent #1288 (Petka Antonov).
- setTimeout() will only run the callback once now after an unref() during the callback #1231 (Roman Reiss).
- NOTE: there are still other unresolved concerns with the timers code, such as #1152.
Windows: a "delay-load hook" has been added for compiled add-ons on Windows that should alleviate some of the problems that Windows users may be experiencing with add-ons in io.js #1251 (Bert Belder).
V8: minor bug-fix upgrade for V8 to 4.1.0.27.
npm: upgrade npm to 2.7.4. See npm CHANGELOG.md for details.

Some problems exist with timers and unref() still to be resolved. See #1152.
Possible small memory leak(s) may still exist but have yet to be properly identified, details at #1075.
Surrogate pair in REPL can freeze terminal #690
Not possible to build io.js as a static library #686
process.send() is not synchronous as the docs suggest, a regression introduced in 1.0.2, see #760 and fix in #774
Calling dns.setServers() while a DNS query is in progress can cause the process to crash on a failed assertion #894

Scaleway provides some ARM resources for the iojs test/build infrastructure.
New post on Medium about Node.js reconciliation: Help us reconcile Node.js and io.js
Added support for iojs in Reactive-Extensions/RxJS
joyent/nodejs-advisory-board#30 merged
Mikeal Rogers working on reconciling Project Lifecycle and WG joyent/nodejs-advisory-board#33
Rod Vagg opened the discussion forum about Node.js reconciliation in iojs/io.js#1336

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