Node 8 is out, did you hear? And it’s faster, or so they say.

But without any numbers, ‘faster’ is just letters.

Luckily, I have a big fat React site running on Node 6, and two hours to spare.

It was easy enough to upgrade to Node 8 — it took about 10 minutes, with not a single broken library. I installed on macOS with the .pkg file from the website, and it was relatively smooth sailing. Although I did need to manually remove usr/local/lib/node_modules/ .

All well and good, but I’ll try it later on my Windows machine and it will probably take four days.

Edit: holy crap, it worked like a charm on Windows. No manual steps, no broken packages, none of the white hot mess required not so long ago.

The site

These performance comparisons are for a medium-to-large React site with a single page. On the server, it takes a JSON object with a few thousand properties and returns HTML with 2113 DOM nodes.

(Yes, that is far too many DOM nodes. Yes, it does take two seconds just to parse it on a phone. But alas, I am too far down the food chain to do anything about it. Oh and half of those are hidden, only there “for SEO” — don’t even get me started.)