An early look at three high-impact ES6 features coming soon to Node.js

Google is currently developing V8 4.9 , which will ship in the upcoming Chrome 49 release. V8 4.9 is a particularly exciting update, because it includes support for 91% of the ECMAScript 2015 (ES6) standard. When Node.js 6 launches with these V8 improvements, powerful new language features like destructuring assignment and proxies will work out of the box–without requiring special measures like command line flags or transpilers. Although Node 6.0 isn’t scheduled for release until April, you can experience a little bit of the future today by compiling Node’s vee-eight-4.9 branch from source code. The vee-eight branches are where Node’s maintainers do the heavy lifting to make Node compatible with new versions of V8. The code from these branches is understandably not suitable for use in production environments, but it’s a fun a way to get an early look at coming improvements. In this blog post, I’m going to walk you through a handful of the new ES6 features that you can use out of the box in the vee-eight-4.9 branch. It’s worth noting that many of these features are also available for testing in Node 5.x by using Babel or command line flags if you want to follow along without compiling.