Node.js overview

As an asynchronous event-driven JavaScript runtime, Node.js is designed to build scalable network applications.

Node.js is similar in design to, and influenced by, systems like Ruby's Event Machine and Python's Twisted. Node.js takes the event model a bit further. It presents an event loop as a runtime construct instead of as a library. In other systems, there is always a blocking call to start the event-loop. Typically, behavior is defined through callbacks at the beginning of a script, and at the end a server is started through a blocking call like EventMachine::run(). In Node.js, there is no such start-the-event-loop call. Node.js simply enters the event loop after executing the input script. Node.js exits the event loop when there are no more callbacks to perform. This behavior is like browser JavaScript - the event loop is hidden from the user.

HTTP is a first-class citizen in Node.js, designed with streaming and low latency in mind. This makes Nodejs well suited for the foundation of a web library or framework.

Node.js being designed without threads doesn't mean you can't take advantage of multiple cores in your environment. Child processes can be spawned by using our child_process.fork() API, and are designed to be easy to communicate with. Built upon that same interface is the cluster module, which allows you to share sockets between processes to enable load balancing over your cores.

What’s new in version 24.14.0

Notable Changes

(Semver-Minor) async_hooks: add trackPromises option to createHook() (Joyee Cheung) #61415
Build,deps: replace cjs-module-lexer with merve (Yagiz Nizipli) #61456
(Semver-Minor) deps: add Lief as a dependency (Joyee Cheung) #61167
(Semver-Minor) events: repurpose events.listenerCount() to accept EventTargets (René) #60214
(Semver-Minor) fs: add ignore option to fs.watch (Matteo Collina) #61433
(Semver-Minor) http: add http.setGlobalProxyFromEnv() (Joyee Cheung) #60953
(Semver-Minor) module: allow subpath imports that start with #/ (Jan Martin) #60864
(Semver-Minor) process: preserve AsyncLocalStorage in queueMicrotask only when needed (Gürgün Dayıoğlu) #60913
(Semver-Minor) sea: split sea binary manipulation code (Joyee Cheung) #61167
(Semver-Minor) sqlite: enable defensive mode by default (Bart Louwers) #61266
(Semver-Minor) sqlite: add sqlite prepare options args (Guilherme Araújo) #61311
(Semver-Minor) src: add initial support for Esm in embedder Api (Joyee Cheung) #61548
(Semver-Minor) stream: add bytes() method to node:stream/consumers (wantaek) #60426
(Semver-Minor) stream: do not pass readable.compose() output via Readable.from() (René) #60907
(Semver-Minor) test: use fixture directories for sea tests (Joyee Cheung) #61167
(Semver-Minor) test_runner: add env option to run function (Ethan Arrowood) #61367
(Semver-Minor) test_runner: support expecting a test-case to fail (Jacob Smith) #60669
(Semver-Minor) util: add convertProcessSignalToExitCode utility (Erick Wendel) #60963

Full list of changes available here

Node.js for Mac

Node.js overview

What’s new in version 24.14.0

Notable Changes

Node.js for Mac

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