14 DAY TRIAL // Almost six months after putting out Node.js 5.0, the Node.js Foundation has announced an hour ago the immediate public availability of the Node.js version 6.0 on a two-year Long Term Support (LTS) plan.
According to the Node.js Foundation's LTS plan, Node.js 6.x will receive official support until April 2018, and then only maintenance updates until April 2019.
Get ready to ditch Node.js 0.10 and 0.12
With today's release, the Foundation has stopped LTS support for the old 0.12 branch. Its officially supported versions are 4.x and 6.x, after previously announcing that version 5.x would only be a testbed for fooling around with upcoming 6.x features.
Long Term Support for Node.js 4.x will end in April 2017, so there's still enough time to transition to version 6.x. Version 0.10 and 0.12 will only receive maintenance updates until October 2016, and December 2016 respectively, when they'll reach EoL (End of Life).
Foundation experts say that Node.js 4.x will continue to be the recommended Node.js version for production usage while the recent Node.js 6.x release will be considered stable, but it will also include many new JavaScript features that have not yet been fully tested in production environments to their full extent.
As it stands right now, Node.js developers should use Node.js 4.x "if [they] need stability and have a complex production environment" or Node.js 6.x "if [they] have the ability to upgrade versions quickly and want to play with the latest features as they arrive."
Node.js 6 covers 93% of all ES6 features
The Node.js team is bragging about supporting 93 percent of the ECMAScript 6 (JavaScript 2015) standard, released last June. Node.js 5.x only supported 56 percent of the ES6 standard.
The team is also really proud of its new module loading system, which it says it's now four times faster than in Node.js 4.x.
Other significant changes included with Node.js 6 is the switch to using Google's V8 version 5.0 for Node's JavaScript engine, as well as the obligatory batch of bugfixes and performance improvements.
