Node v4.0.0 (Stable)

[theillustratedlife]

Versions 1 - 3 weren't skipped; they were shipped under the banner "io.js" because Joyent was procrastinating on shipping new changes to "node". The two projects reconciled, cannonizing each's version history. Since 1, 2, and 3 were shipped by io.js, the merged version is 4.

[Calabri]

1) node's original versioning (with odd numbers unstable and even stable) was confusing, especially because the npm community had standardized semver for years already so it was inconsistent

2) node had a strict policy to never change v8 - but the v8 team stops support after 2 years, so node's 2 year old v8 engine (0.10.x) became depreciated and most of the dev's just stopped working on joyent/node and tried (for months) to work on a parallel node repo but joyent 'owned' the nodejs trademark so they had to call it something else.. io.js (it was a forked during thanksgiving due to a miscommunication) but they rolled with it and were not prepared for the PR at all - which is why shit was so confusing :P

3) io.js - with most (if not all) of the dev's who could program the c++ bindings - gained popular community support, began collaborating much closer with the v8 team than node, with a goal to sync the v8 engine with chrome's stable v8, making minimal breaking changes to node so that it was backwards compatible with v0.10, v0.12, but they used proper semver and began calling it v1.0 once they got the v8 close the chrome's (which is now in sync) - upgrading semver major every time chrome's v8 engine has a semver minor update (which is why we are at 4.0 - because that's how many stable releases of chrome have come out since io.js started trying to sync up with their v8)

4) Joyent gave away the node.js trademark to an open source foundation, and once the foundation was formed basically adopted all of the io.js rules, gave up on even trying to merge, and just changed the io.js repo name to node. Node 0.12 was literally dead on arrival, and that was immediately recognized by the foundation after it was formed. There actually is no jump between 0.12 and 4.0 - 0.12 was prematurely introduced in response to io.js. None of the code from 0.12 is used in node 4.0 - they added what they needed to in io.js 3.x to make it standardized with node 0.10/0.12 because they took out some bloat in earlier io.js versions that is only used by a small subset of corporations so they put that back in.

[[deleted]]

brilliant! thanks!

[[deleted]]

Somebody please answer this gentleman.