Way back in 2007, Jeff Atwood made a bold prediction. Any application that can be written in JavaScript will eventually end up being written in JavaScript. At the time, it sounded like one of those bad jokes developers make on Reddit. But now, almost 20 years later, it looks more like a prophecy. Today, JavaScript runs on your browser, your server, your desktop, your smartwatch, your smart fridge, your CI/CD pipeline, your router, and unsurprisingly, it runs even on your malware. The scripting language that was built in 7 days and originally couldn't even do basic file management, is now being used at scale for data theft and ransomware deployment. Microsoft, a company that knows a thing or two about distributing malware, recently released a report confirming that NodeJS is becoming a favorite among cyber criminals. According to the Microsoft Defender team, NodeJS is now one of the top tools cyber criminals use to bypass antivirus programs and run scripts that edit registry keys, launch PowerShells, and schedule background tasks. all that because whether we like it or not, Node.js is becoming a powerhouse in software development. And at the exact same time, the new 24 version is probably the most powerful, modern, and developer friendly release the platform has had in years. So, let's look at what's new in Note 24 and why this release matters. First of all, Note now runs on V8 version 13.6, which brings several useful language features that align with the latest JavaScript standards. Regular expressions escape is also here. So we can finally get rid of sketchy stack overflow copypastes just to safely escape a user input in a rejects. Float 16 array gives you 16- bit float arrays which is useful if you're doing performance sensitive tasks like machine learning, image processing or whatever AI based nonsense is trendy these days. Atomics pause and web assembly memory 64 both improve nodes concurrency and high performance computing capabilities. But let's be honest, the fact that people even need this in JavaScript is both impressive and mildly alarming. What's more exciting is the introduction of await using which is part of the explicit resource management proposal. So JavaScript finally gets a clean way to autoc close files, sockets, and other resources. We also get error is error which does exactly what it says, checks if something's actually an error. It's a small fix, but a useful one and a quiet admission that instance of was never that great. The permission model introduced in node 20 is also evolving. This heli flag is now just permission signaling it's getting closer to being stable. You can now sandbox what your scripts can access, ranging from files, network or the environment. This is not perfect, but it's the first real step toward giving nodes some of the guardrails already available in other JS environments. In other smaller updates, URL pattern is now global, so you can match URLs cleanly without juggling rejects or extra dependencies. The test runner improves too and subtests are now automatically awaited, meaning fewer bugs and one less reason to reach for an external test framework. Note 24 also ships with a faster and more compliant HTTP experience under the hood of fetch. And finally, we get npm version 11 with faster installs, better security checks, and less legacy junk. So your CI pipeline might actually finish before launch. If you like this video, you should check out my second channel linked in the description, or you could watch one of these videos next. Until next time, thank you for watching.