Weekly Update - Mar 6th, 2015

io.js 1.5.0 Release

On Friday, March 6th, @rvagg released io.js v1.5.0. The complete change log can be found on GitHub.

Notable changes

• buffer: New Buffer#indexOf() method, modelled off Array#indexOf(). Accepts a String, Buffer or a Number. Strings are interpreted as UTF8. (Trevor Norris) #561
• fs: options object properties in 'fs' methods no longer perform a hasOwnProperty() check, thereby allowing options objects to have prototype properties that apply. (Jonathan Ong) #635
• tls: A likely TLS memory leak was reported by PayPal. Some of the recent changes in stream_wrap appear to be to blame. The initial fix is in #1078, you can track the progress toward closing the leak at #1075 (Fedor Indutny).
• npm: Upgrade npm to 2.7.0. See npm CHANGELOG.md for details including why this is a semver-minor when it could have been semver-major.
• TC: Colin Ihrig (@cjihrig) resigned from the TC due to his desire to do more code and fewer meetings.

Known issues

• Possible TLS-related memory leak, details at #1075.
• Windows still reports some minor test failures and we are continuing to address all of these as a priority. See #1005.
• 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

Community Updates

• You can relax knowing that io.js and latest Node.js are not affected by the FREAK Attack. You are running io.js or the latest version of Node.js, right?

• Walmart is now sponsoring a build machine for the io.js Jenkins CI system. The @iojs/build team is working on creating io.js SunOS binaries (like you can get from nodejs.org). A V8 fix (iojs/io.js#1079) needs to be landed first before more progress can be made.

• We would also like to thank the following companies for contributing hardware and related technology/support/engineering for io.js builds:

  • Digital Ocean (mainly Linux)
  • Rackspace (mainly Windows)
  • Voxer (OS X and FreeBSD)
  • NodeSource (ARMv6 & ARMv7)
  • Linaro (ARMv8)
  • Walmart (SmartOS / Solaris)

• The io.js community has been hard at work on the internationalization of all of its content. There are now over 20 active languages published on iojs.org and i18n community sites. Additionally, i18n links (iojs/website#258) have been added to the website footer for easy access. Are we missing your language? Help us add it!

• Speaking of translations, the io.js roadmap presentation has been updated to link to other language versions.

• It seems that PayPal is running an experiment comparing Kappa on io.js vs Node.js 0.12 vs Node.js v0.10. The PayPal team identified a likely TLS memory leak. Initial fix is in #1078 and progress towards closing is in #1075

• NodeSource is now providing io.js Linux binary packages for Ubuntu/Debian as well as RHEL/Fedora distributions.

• The io.js Docker build is one of thirteen new official Docker repositories added in January and February.

• NodeBots and IoT people should be happy to hear that the just-announced Tessel2 runs io.js natively.

• @maxbeatty is working on a new version of the jsperf.com backend, running on io.js and it is entirely open source. Contributions are welcome!

• @eranhammer wrote a blog post called The Node Version Dilemma which discusses the various Node.js / io.js versions and proposes which ones to use and when to use them.

io.js Support Added

• scrypt now supports io.js. Learn more from this GitHub issue
• proxyquire v1.3.2 published with support for iojs.