#node.js release

Welcome to another epic episode of This week in Node, where I blog about the latest news and updates in the Node.js community.

Node 0.4.8

A new Node stable has been released just one day after I posted This week in Node #20. This release brings us more performance for encrypted SSL connections. This is achieved by disabling the compressions in OpenSSL. This improves memory consumption and speed. If you want to apply compression it should now be done in "userland".

Full list of fixes

#974 Properly report traceless errors (isaacs)

#983 Better JSON.parse error detection in REPL (isaacs)

#836 Agent socket errors bubble up to req only if req exists

#1041 Fix event listener leak check timing (koichik)

#1038 Fix dns.resolve() with ‘PTR’ throws Error: Unknown type “PTR” (koichik)

#1073 Share SSL context between server connections (Fedor Indutny)

Disable compression with OpenSSL. Improves memory perf.

Implement os.totalmem() and os.freemem() for SunOS (Alexandre Marangone)

Fix a special characters in URL regression (isaacs)

Fix idle timeouts in HTTPS (Felix Geisendörfer)

SlowBuffer.write() with ‘ucs2′ throws ReferenceError. (koichik)

http.ServerRequest ‘close’ sometimes gets an error argument (Felix Geisendörfer)

Doc improvements

cleartextstream.destroy() should close(2) the socket. Previously was being mapped to a shutdown(2) syscall.

No longer compile out asserts and debug statements in normal build.

Debugger improvements.

Upgrade V8 to 3.1.8.16.

Download the latest version from the Node.js site http://nodejs.org/dist/node-v0.4.8.tar.gz

New Core team members

Just announced today, 2 new core team members (Bert and Felix) have been added to Node. Bert Belder (@piscisaureus) has contributed countless bug fixes for the windows, not only fixing bugs but also implementing new features in windows. He has been working been working allot on Libuv the last couple of weeks / months and it's being integrated in to node as we speak.

Felix (@felixge) has been working and patching allot of different I/O streams which are one the most important parts of Node.js. But not only did he work on Streams, he fixed and worked on allot of more important parts of Node.js.