State of io.js
The most successful open source initiative in living memory.
A lot has happened in the few months since io.js was announced. An ambitious release date was set for January 13th, Fedor’s Birthday, and after a lot of hard work from a remarkable number of people we made it with just a few timezones to spare ☺
In addition to the first release there have been 4 patch releases which have been downloaded over 400K times.
We’re seeing more contributions than anyone could have anticipated. Since we announced the project two people, Chris Dickinson and Colin Ihrig, have been added to the TC (the project’s governing body) for their outstanding work on the project. Domenic Denicola has also been invited to the TC meetings as a non-voting participant (like myself and Rod Vagg) which has opened up collaboration with v8 and TC39.
In the lifetime of node.js™ there have never been more than 8 active committers. Last week Chris Dickinson onboarded 8 new committers to io.js with plans to bring on another round this week.
Current releases of io.js are releases of v8 slated to be marked stable and released in Chrome in early March. From that point on we will have a stable channel, using the latest stable v8, and an unstable channel with the next line of v8 development. This means that you can expect io.js to be marked stable in March. The unstable line will continue and be used for testing new features in both io.js and v8.
Some tasks outside of core development have already grown to the point that they necessitate their own project teams and committers. In addition to the build group which was established when we launched there is now a website group and a streams group. We expect to see working groups form around evangelism, documentation, i18n, nan, and the roadmap in the future. These groups offer a much wider range of participation from the community.
When io.js began the largest concern was the lack of contributors to node.js™. Now io.js’ biggest problem is keeping up with the flood of contributors coming in, participating in every facet of the project. io.js isn’t just healthier than node.js™ today, it’s healthier than node.js™ ever was and this is only the beginning.
