Main announcements of the Node.js conference: what was shown to developers

JavaScript (Node.js) Conference: Main Announcements

Last week, the largest conference dedicated to the Node.js ecosystem was held online. The event gathered over 10,000 participants from around the world, including maintainers of key libraries, engineers from V8, Deno, and Bun, as well as representatives from corporations using server-side JavaScript in production. We have compiled for you the most significant announcements and innovations that will affect developers' work in the coming months.

Node.js 22: New LTS and Built-in Test Runner

The main event was the announcement of the stable version of Node.js 22, which has transitioned to Long Term Support (LTS) status. Key changes include:

• Built-in test runner — no need to install Jest or Mocha for basic testing. Supports describe/it, mock functions, and parallel execution.
• Improved ESM handling — ECMAScript modules now load 30% faster thanks to optimizations in the module parser.
• RegExp v support — a new flag for working with Unicode sequences, simplifying the processing of multilingual strings.
• Updated WebSocket — an experimental WebSocket client compatible with the browser API.

New Runtime: WinterJS — Faster than Bun?

A surprising announcement was the launch of WinterJS, a new JavaScript runtime focused on server-side computing. The developers position it as an alternative to Node.js and Bun with an emphasis on:

• Instant startup — cold start under 5 ms (compared to ~15 ms for Bun and ~40 ms for Node.js).
• Built-in HTTP/3 — support for the QUIC protocol for high-load APIs.
• Full npm compatibility — WinterJS uses its own package manager but supports installation from the npm registry.

The project is currently in beta testing but is already available for experimentation.

Tools: Turbo 2.0 and Improved ESLint

The conference also presented updates to popular developer tools:

• Turbo 2.0 — a new version of the monorepo tool from Vercel. Now supports parallel builds with automatic file-level caching, speeding up CI/CD by up to 5 times.
• ESLint 9 — completely rewritten in TypeScript, with flat config enabled by default. New rules for working with async/await and protection against memory leaks.
• Playwright 2.0 — support for mobile devices and network delay emulation right out of the box.

Security and Observability

Special attention was paid to security. An integration of OpenTelemetry into the Node.js core was announced, simplifying request tracing without third-party libraries. A new tool, NodeSec CLI, was also presented — a dependency analyzer that checks for vulnerabilities in package.json in real time and offers fixes.

Results and Prospects

The conference showed that the Node.js ecosystem continues to actively develop: new runtimes are emerging, performance is improving, and standard tools are becoming smarter. Developers should pay attention to Node.js 22 as a stable platform