What version of Node do you currently use? Right now I am using the latest iteration of Node 18, mainly for compatibility reasons. I am thinking about switching over to Node 20 or Node 22...Is it worth switching over?
I've found this page to be the most helpful list of all major/minor/patch changes:
https://nodejs.org/en/blog/release/
example: https://nodejs.org/en/blog/release/v16.0.0/
Another good resource to find changes to all the different major versions, is the changelog archive on nodejs' github:
https://github.com/nodejs/node/tree/main/doc/changelogs
Hello everyone! I'm really into updating my nodejs version on my system, but I'm seeing quite some downs and ups about the v18 and v20 vs the v16. I don't really know how to benchmark and test all that versions, also I'm into learning it someday. Anyone have some graphics or data that you want to share about like the performance comparation between this two/three versions of node? Also what do you think about the new stuff, the ups and downs, anything you want to comment?!
Edit: So, I read all of the comments and searched about it, thank you all for the replies. In a nutshell, node 20 in terms of performance, is the same, if not even better than node 16, in terms of security, I read the changelogs, and omg, there was a BUNCH of exploits that were patched, also a lot of bugs in standard functoin were found and resolved. u/Climax708 mentioned about a benchmark and his recently contribution, I read the results and what they had there, and are actually much better than I expected. Here the link he provided
Also node 20 has new stuff that are now officialy stable, I recommend to see for yourself
Also, u/xabrol and u/vorticalbox mentioned two tools that seems very useful depending the project you're working on, node nvm and a asdf. They allow you to use/manage different versions of node very easily. (asdf allow not only node but more environments too)
Our application is built upon Vue, Nunjucks, Express and around 80 other dependencies. Around 30 packages have been deprecated. It’s a live application with around 15 million daily viewers. Currently the application is built upon Node 14.x version and they haven’t upgrade the Node for a few years.
Now they have delegated the task to me to upgrade the application to Node 20.x.
Tbh, I’m a bit overwhelmed since the tech debt is massive and currently I’m the only one working on it, so I need your help to figure our the correct direction from which to approach this task.
So, far I could figure two possible approaches:
To install node 20.x in the local using nvm and the npm install, then run npm build and troubleshoot all the build errors one by one.
To start from an empty folder with node 20.x and start migrating few files at a time by removing most features and then adding stuff bit by bit to make the application work at the simplest level and then build upon it.
Please suggest the correct approach for handling this task.
Thanks!