en.Wedoany.com Reported - The Node.js project team under the U.S. OpenJS Foundation officially released Node.js 26.0.0, the current version, on May 5, 2026, local time. This even-numbered version will enter long-term support in October 2026, at which point it will receive 30 months of security and stability maintenance, covering a period lasting until May 2029. The team simultaneously confirmed that maintenance for the LTS branch Node.js 20.x ended on April 30, 2026, and support for Node.js 25.x will cease on June 1, 2026.
The most significant change in Node.js 26 is that the Temporal API has officially shed its experimental flag and is now enabled by default for all developers. Temporal is a modern date and time API designed specifically for JavaScript, directly addressing the long-standing limitations of the language's built-in Date object in areas such as timezone handling, calendar calculations, durations, and precise instant values. The API provides non-timezone-bound types like PlainDate, PlainTime, and PlainDateTime, suitable for scenarios like fixed scheduling and local records; the ZonedDateTime type associates a date and time with a specific timezone, ensuring accuracy in cross-regional calculations; the Instant type represents an absolute point in time as nanoseconds since January 1, 1970, catering to the needs of distributed systems and audit trails. The API also features built-in temporal arithmetic operations and formatting output capabilities, reducing reliance on external date libraries.
The underlying JavaScript engine V8 has been simultaneously upgraded to version 14.6.202.33, corresponding to Chromium 146. This version introduces two TC39 language proposals: Map and WeakMap gain new getOrInsert and getOrInsertComputed methods, simplifying the common "read or initialize" pattern; the Iterator.concat method can merge multiple iterators into a single sequence. As NODE_MODULE_VERSION has been updated to 147, all native addons compiled against earlier Node.js versions will need to be rebuilt. Node.js's built-in HTTP client, Undici, has been updated to version 8.0.2, providing underlying support for the global fetch implementation and HTTP/1.1 and HTTP/2 traffic handling.
This version performs hard removals of several APIs that had been long marked as deprecated. The http.Server.prototype.writeHeader method has been formally removed; developers must switch to using writeHead. The legacy internal stream modules _stream_wrap, _stream_readable, _stream_writable, _stream_duplex, _stream_transform, and _stream_passthrough have also been removed. The --experimental-transform-types flag used for TypeScript transformation has been phased out. module.register has entered a runtime deprecation state, generating a warning upon invocation. The crypto-related deprecation DEP0182 has reached its end of life, while DEP0203 and DEP0204 have simultaneously transitioned to runtime deprecation. Furthermore, Node.js 26 fixes a V8 array index hash collision vulnerability, designated CVE-2026-21717. The KeyObject API has added support for raw key formats, the built-in SQLite integration has enabled the percentile extension, ICU has been updated to version 78.3, and libuv has been updated to version 1.52.1.
The build environment requirements have been raised accordingly. Compiling Node.js 26 from source now requires GCC 13.2 or higher, and Python 3.9 is no longer supported. The target hardware for AIX and IBM i platforms has been raised to Power 9, and the minimum Windows SDK requirement has been raised to the Windows 11 SDK. The V8 mid-tier optimizing compiler, Maglev, is now enabled by default on the Linux s390x architecture. Binary files for multiple platforms including Windows, macOS, Linux, and AIX are now available for download from the Node.js official website.
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