io.js will be slowly integrated back into Node.js

May 28, 2015 07:16 GMT  ·  By

After a messy split, the io.js team made of former Node.js core developers have voted to merge back into Node.js, joining the newly created Node.js Foundation.

What started as a rumor in 2014 has materialized in January 2015 when a large group of Node.js developers have forked the Node.js source code and created their own version called io.js.

The reason for this split was Joyent, the company behind Node.js at that stage, and its lackluster efforts in managing what can easily be considered the hottest Web development technology on the market right now.

io.js has managed to add an extremely large number of modern features and fix a huge number of bugs, its developers quickly reaching io.js 2.0 whilst Node.js has barely released a tiny patch.

And so the Node.js Foundation was born

This split down the middle in the Node community has forced Joyent's hand, and in an effort with PayPal, IBM, Microsoft, and other companies that are heavily relying on it, the Node.js Foundation was started in February 2015, and finally established in May.

With The Linux Foundation pledging its efforts to help the Node community watch over its darling baby, along with a solid structure for managing future releases, it has convinced the io.js Technical Committee to propose, vote, and eventually agree to merge back into Node.js.

The announcement was a simple reply on a GitHub issue, exactly how you'd imagine a developer handling situations like these, but it has brought a lot of joy to Node developers around the Internet.

At this point, no io.js code has managed to make its way into the Node.js core, but new releases are again coming out on a regular basis. The future is once more bright for Node.js and its developers, which can now expect ES6 support to finally make it into the Node core, and maybe v1.0 can be released and prove to everyone that unicorns exist.