API changes between v0.10 and v0.12

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V8

0.12.0 ships with V8 version 3.28.73, which was released in August 2014.

Resource Management

• On Unix soft ulimit values are ignored.

Buffers

Module API Changes

• Buffer class has been removed and replaced with a namespace. So using node::Buffer will no longer work.
• All node::Buffer::New() variants now return Local<Object> instead of Buffer*.
• The return value for node::Buffer::New() is an instantiated JS Buffer object.
• node::Buffer::New(Handle<String>) now accepts an optional second argument of enum encoding.
• API addition of node::Buffer::Use() which will use the passed char* instead of making a copy.
• API addition of node::Crypto::Certificate which handles node::Crypto::Certificate::verifySpkac(Handle<String>), node::Crypto::Certificate::exportPublicKey(Handle<String>) & node::Crypto::Certificte::exportChallenge(Handle<String>) for working naively with SPKAC (Signed public key & challenges) coming from the HTML5 keygen element.

JS API Changes

• External memory is now allocated using smalloc, instead of using SlowBuffer as the parent backing.
• SlowBuffer has been repurposed to return a Buffer instance that has no parent backing.
• buffer.parent now points to an object that has been allocated via smalloc.alloc, not a Buffer instance, and only if the buffer is a slice.
• buffer.offset is now a read-only prototype property equal to zero since no instance methods require working on the parent backing.
• API additions Buffer.alloc() and Buffer.dispose() have been added.
• Buffer#fill() has been extended to fill with the entire passed value.
• (new Buffer('text\0!', 'ascii')).toString() outputs 'text !' in 0.10 and 'text\u0000!' in 0.12.
• Writable stream _write() gets called with 'buffer' encoding when chunk is a Buffer (#6119).
• Writable stream emits 'finish' on next tick if there was a write() (#6118).

Process

• process.maxTickDepth has been removed, allowing process.nextTick to starve I/O indefinitely. This is due to adding setImmediate in 0.10.

Child Process

• customFds option to child_process.spawn is deprecated. Instead of customFds you can use stdio like https://github.com/mochajs/mocha/pull/1364/files

https

• SNICallback required returning a secureContext synchronously as function (hostname) {}. The function signature is now function (hostname, cb) { cb(null, secureContext); }. You can feature detect with 'function' === typeof cb.

Signal handling

In node 0.10.x, exit from a fatal signal was accomplished by a signal handler in node which called exit(128 + signo). So for SIGINT (signal 2), a node process observing the exit of a spawned node process would observe that process exiting 130, but no signal would be noted (see waitid(2) for more information on how a process waiting for another determines if the waitee exited due to a signal). In node 0.12.x, a node process observing the exit of a spawned child node process will see a null code, and a 'SIGINT' as the signal.

Here is a pair of test programs which illustrates the difference.

$ cat sleeper.js
setTimeout(function () {}, 300000)

$ cat test.js
cp = require("child_process");
p = cp.spawn("node", ["sleeper.js"]);
report = function (code, signal) { console.log("code=" + code + ", signal=" + signal); }
p.on('exit', report);
setTimeout(function() { p.kill('SIGINT') }, 2000);

On node 0.10 this produces:

$ node test.js
code=130, signal=null

On node 0.12 this produces:

$ node test.js
code=null, signal=SIGINT

This can be a subtle porting issue for multi-process node environments which care about signals (such as test harnesses). This change was introduced by main: Handle SIGINT properly.