> "Async/await will land in Node with the next V8 update."<p>You can actually try the async-await functionality with Node Current (7.2.1 as of this writing) by passing the flag --harmony-async-await:<p><pre><code> node --harmony-async-await app.js
</code></pre>
It will be available without flags in the LTS release in March (that is in 3 months). Say goodbye to Callback Hell, the future of Node.js is looking pretty good.
If you want to use chrome devtools without changing your version of node, I'd recommend this implementation of node + devtool that uses electron (<a href="https://github.com/Jam3/devtool" rel="nofollow">https://github.com/Jam3/devtool</a>).<p>It literally changed my life. Thanks whoever is responsible for this project.
I was confused when writing a NodeJs script last night which ES* features were supported in the node runtime I had installed (6.9.x).<p>This blog posts mentioned Node already fully supports ES6.<p>Is there a table anywhere that lists ES6/ES7 features and which nodejs version supports it natively?<p>I assume async/await (which I love and use from TypeScript) will only be available in Node 7.x and not 6.x.<p>The Node.js home-page makes node 7.x look scary unstable, is there any real-world caveats to using it?
Well, v8 is no longer the only alternative.
Now there's Chakra as well.<p><a href="https://github.com/nodejs/node-chakracore" rel="nofollow">https://github.com/nodejs/node-chakracore</a><p>Many native modules are however v8 modules, not sure how that may work.
The number one thing Google could do to improve v8, IMO, is to give it an easy to use cross platform build system. CMake for example. V8 has repeatedly changed build systems. From SCons to Gyp and now to GN. All of these systems have been fraught with errors. Just try building the latest v8 on OSX, Windows and Linux. The SCons system was actually the most reliable. It may not have had all the fancy features of the newer build systems but it was much easier to reliably reproduce the builds.<p>The second biggest improvement would be to simplify the API. Using Contexts, Isolates, HandleScopes, etc. is complicated and causes the code to crash in unpredictable ways when you get it wrong. The API was built with Chrome's internals in mind and this shows.