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**James Snell:** Okay, so right now what's inside V8 - you have the compiler, and you optimize with the compiler: it takes the JavaScript and compiles it down to bytecode, optimizes it and does a number of tricks to make it faster. The TurboFan+Ignition is just a new compiler and a new optimizer inside V8, and for most... |
\[11:45\] The code that is going to see a significant difference is code that has been highly, highly optimized to take advantage of quirks in the old Crankshaft optimizer. We have some examples of this in Node core itself, where we actually will unroll for loops in order to make it faster. What that means is instead o... |
Code that is highly optimized for Crankshaft could actually end up running slower under TurboFan, because a lot of those optimization tricks are not longer there or are being done a completely different way. |
We shouldn't see code break, we shouldn't see any existing stuff just stop working, but we could see a very different performance profile under the new tool chain once we enable that. That's where the biggest difference people will see is - just the performance of their applications will change. |
**Mikeal Rogers:** Particularly with ES6, right? |
**James Snell:** Oh, yeah. Any new JavaScript features should become significantly faster. |
**Mikeal Rogers:** Yeah, and async/await is in here too, right? I think it was also in version 7, but this is the first one that's scheduled to go into LTS; there's a lot more users coming onto it. So async/await is starting to become a feature that you can just kind of depend on. |
**Alex Sexton:** ...in Node. |
**James Snell:** Yeah, in Node. There's efforts right now even to explore allowing async/await in the repl, so just on the command line, being able to do await, and -- there's quite a few things that are being looked at, figuring out how to make it more useful. Util.promisify() is gonna go a long way towards making tha... |
**Mikeal Rogers:** You said there were like a ton of major changes... A lot of those are breaks, and not these feature ads... So what are the things that were broken? |
**James Snell:** I'm kind of going through the list right now... Buffer num now zero fills by default, if you call a new buffer. It's not really so much breaking as in functionality, but breaking in terms of performance; it's significantly slower. |
**Mikeal Rogers:** But safer. |
**James Snell:** Yeah, significantly safer. I'm kind of looking through some of these others... Most of the breaking changes -- we mark them SemVer major largely for defensive purposes... It could break, it doesn't necessarily definitely break. For example, in child process we're doing more argument validation. Before ... |
Same thing with some of the crypto arguments... There's a few deprecations in here, a few new things that users really shouldn't have been using in the first place, that we're only using internally, like SyncRight stream I think is one of them -- it's always been there, but it was always intended to be just an internal... |
A lot of these are changes to error messages. We have to treat error message changes as semver major in core because people actually parse error messages to determine what happened. So what we're doing is we're going through and adding new static error codes to all these, so that if you wanna know what error actually o... |
Once we make that change, we'll be handling error message changes as semver minors or patches, and only changes to the error code or error type will be semver major. That will be a big change coming up soon. We've started that process of migrating those now. |
**Alex Sexton:** I find that I can't think of a project or a company that I've been at that didn't eventually hit that point where it's like "Maybe we should stop allowing users to rely on regex to know what went wrong in the application, and give them some solid code." It also matters a lot for internationalization wh... |
**James Snell:** \[16:13\] Yeah, like I said, there's over 150 of these here, so... |
**Alex Sexton:** If you're more like my end and doing less -- I mean, I do plain Node applications, but if you're more of a web developer and you use it as a build chain, are you gonna notice speed improvements, are you gonna notice nothing? Is there something that sticks out, like a less server-y person might recogniz... |
**James Snell:** From that point of view, no. I think it should be pretty straightforward. There are a few things that should improve usability... Right now, if you're using a set of tools and some dependency on those tools uses a deprecated API, it's very common for people to see all these deprecation warnings appear ... |
Overall, performance should be roughly the same as what we had under 7. There's some things that are faster, there's some things that are slower, but on average it's the same. |
**Alex Sexton:** Did 7 get a lot faster than 6? I think most of us stick to the even numbers... |
**James Snell:** Yeah, there have been some improvements. Some things are faster, some things are slower. What we're seeing is -- some of the slowdown is actually caused by V8 - these changes that are being done in the optimizer underneath. Node - this goes back to the early conversation about TurboFan - uses a lot of ... |
So you'll see some variance there. Some things will run significantly faster, some things will run actually quite a bit slower. |
**Jessica Lord:** I saw a tweet the other day - which I don't think I'll be able to find - about how many people had already downloaded Node 8. Do you feel like they're -- \[laughter\] I mean, I don't even know... I saw on its own, and I'm like "Is this a good number?" Are a lot of people still on really old Nodes, or ... |
**James Snell:** I think people will get on this version very quickly. It's still too early to tell for sure, but I think within a single day it was 105,000, or something like that. I'll have to take a look at the latest numbers. What we're finding is that most of the downloads occur on the LTS versions. |
If you look at version 6, for instance, as soon as it went LTS, the number of downloads spiked significantly. It's still the most downloaded version out there right now, by an extremely large margin. During the first six months of 6's life, version 4 was the highest. And as soon as 6 became the LTS, people were downloa... |
If you look at version 7, it's not an LTS version - it's newer than 6, it had async/await - its downloads were significantly lower than 6 still. So I think what you'll find is that as soon as 8 goes LTS... |
**Alex Sexton:** When is that? |
**James Snell:** That's gonna be in October... Then is when the downloads for 8 will really start to take off and it will become the predominant version. |
**Mikeal Rogers:** \[19:55\] I was looking at these graphs the other day actually, and one of the really nice things about them is that really old versions of Node are going away quicker. There's a floor that you can't kind of go below because a bunch of CI just tests against older versions, but we can be fairly confid... |
We were comparing the numbers earlier, that 100k mark... When we do releases of 6, they peak out at around 800k in a day. So already on day 1 you're at an eighth of the market share for the last LTS line. Then by the time that we hit that six-month mark, it is a big shift. |
Alright, I think that that covers Node 8. We're gonna take a quick break, and when we come back we're gonna talk a little bit about edumacation. Stick around. |
**Break**: \[21:05\] |
**Mikeal Rogers:** Let's get into this Glit \[laughter\] -- Glitch "raise your hand" feature... |
**Alex Sexton:** Nailed it. \[laughter\] |
**Mikeal Rogers:** Yeah... Jessica, do you wanna walk us through how this feature works and what's interesting about it? |
**Jessica Lord:** \[laughs\] Yes, alright. First of all, if you haven't heard of Glitch director/browser to Glitch.com, Glitch is this really awesome IDE coming out of FogCreek. Jen Schiffer is the community engineer there, and it is all the things - I'll try not to spend too much time just gushing about it... It's an ... |
Glitch really wants to lower the barrier for entry, and building things on the web and making it fun. I think last week they released a new feature for getting help called "raise your hand." If you go to Glitch.com, you'll see at the top of the page it says "Help others - get thanks" That will show you if anybody has a... |
Then anyone who wants to help people who are learning and working on projects on Glitch can go and see who's asking for help. When you respond to someone in need, it'll ask that person to give you access to their project, and then you can get in and start coding with them. |
**Alex Sexton:** \[24:03\] I would like to request from the community that someone make a Chrome plugin that switches the "raise your hand" to a David S. Pumpkins icon -- I don't know if you guys watch this or not, but... \[laughter\] "Any questionsss...?" \[laughter\] Really solid. |
**Mikeal Rogers:** Tom Hanks will send us a cease and desist on that one. \[laughter\] |
**Alex Sexton:** Yeah, for sure. |
**Mikeal Rogers:** I really like this feature, because there's this huge, really important part of education that you get for free when you do -- or not for free, but by default when you do something in person, which is like when somebody gets stuck, they go like "Hey, help me", and then somebody gets them unstuck. And... |
**Alex Sexton:** Yeah, the help exists, but you don't know how to find the help. |
**Mikeal Rogers:** Exactly. So this feature does that. You have to build a support system around stuff, right? One of the things we did in Node School was that there was a lot of online support systems to help people along if they're doing the workshops at home, or even calling back to some of the people that helped th... |
I know Jessica built this really cool bot that would intervene in people learning GitHub, for that whole workshopper, as well. |
**Jessica Lord:** It's still intervening... \[laughter\] About 30 times per day. |
**Mikeal Rogers:** So how does that work, by the way? |
**Jessica Lord:** Yeah, I have a workshopper -- it started as a Node School workshopper that ran in the terminal, but then I switch it to an Electron app because it's for learning Git and GitHub, which I wanted to make more visual to explain to people... Remote versus local, and things like that. So it's an Electron ap... |
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