It's a fork of node.js with ES6 support. The goal is a faster release cycle and an updated V8 engine, plus an "open governance model" as opposed to Joyent's domination of node.js prime.

https://github.com/iojs/io.js

    Current Project Team Members
    ============================

    Isaac Z. Schlueter
    Ben Noordhuis
    Bert Belder
    Fedor Indutny
    Trevor Norris
    Chris Dickinson
    Colin Ihrig
    Mikeal Rogers
    Rod Vagg

> It's a fork of node.js with ES6 support. The goal is a faster release cycle and an updated V8 engine, plus an "open governance model" as opposed to Joyent's domination of node.js prime.

For the record, I believe that's what should be written as the first answer on the FAQ (and maybe on the site's index.hml). The current one is atrocious.

For a comparison, node.js contributors are (http://nodejs.org/about/core-team/)

TJ Fontaine Alexis Campailla Fedor Indutny Trevor Norris Nathan Rajlich

Rather strange to see Fedor as a core team member in both projects, or at least one of them (likely node.js page) is out of date.

Its not strange, most of the people involved are core members of both projects. Its the same project, really. Its just that iojs actually has new releases, and node doesn't anymore.

Yes I know, I need to add `s/anymore/yet`. But the statement is pretty much accurate. Its been almost 2 years since 0.11.0 was released and 0.12 is nowhere in sight.

Are node/io permanently joined to V8? I know that Oracle has been putting some effort into getting Avatar.js to be fully compatible with node and run on the JVM, but it isn't gaining much traction.

I find Ben's inclusion on this list interesting, given his history with Joyent/the node community.

I felt like he got thrown under the bus with that whole uproar, and was glad to see him in there.

With 1098 commits to libuv, which represents 35.2% of all commits to that project and the most number of commits from any single individual, and 1409 commits to node (13.8%, 3rd after Ryan Dahl and Isaac Schlueter), I'd say that him "getting thrown under the bus" is a huge understatement of what happened.

I don't think he got "thrown under the bus" - he moved to a position were others did not want to defend him or even just keep on. Unsurprisingly, I would add, he should know the other people.

Still, the inclusion shows that not all bridges are burned, which makes me happy.

I don't see truth in your statement that core people did not want to defend him. Shitstorm happened mostly by outsiders/ignorants. He didn't want to continue in such a climate. Joyent wrote a blog post that ruined their reputation. - Good net effect one year later is that node might free themself from Joyent and become much more open/inclusive.

Could someone make (or provide a link to) a summary of the melodrama for outsiders ? It being not too partisan for one side or the other would be a plus.

I was interested myself, so I did a little google-foo.

So Ben Noorddhuis was a major contributor to NodeJS and a volunteer (that is, not a Joyent employee). It turns out Ben rejected a pull request that would have made pronoun in the document gender neutral. The documents were already grammatically correct, but whoever made the pull request had a political preference for using a non masculine pronoun. Ben rightly saw this a trivial change. But the political harpies made an issue of it. Joyent put an embarrassing and immature blog posting which essentially called Ben an "Asshole" and said that if he was an employee he'd be fired. https://www.joyent.com/blog/the-power-of-a-pronoun Ben, on the other hand, handled himself quite well. https://github.com/joyent/libuv/pull/1015#issuecomment-29568... https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=6845286

Wow I'd never actually read that Joyent post, it is truly ridiculous!

Wow. I really cannot understand how you see Joyent's actions as immature and embarrassing.

The request is/was/remains a relevant one. Language is important, it is after all the one of the few tools to describe percieved reality.

Because everyone who doesn't live in one of the SJW/progressivist cult bastions realizes that:

a) Talk is cheap, action matters, and the PC police's main strategy is to complain until other people change, instead of enacting change themselves. Accommodating them is useless, they will simply find something new to complain about. Apologies are always insufficient, defiance is considered a declaration of war.

b) Language is indeed important, and redefining concepts like "privilege", "misogyny" and "harassment" to mean whatever the club of the perpetually offended thinks they mean is damaging to sane discourse.

Ben Noordhuis's primary language isn't English, and he was following established PR protocol, so I think he should be given a little bit of leeway.

My comment starts with "I (don't) think". Feel free to think otherwise, but my statement has truth - I know what I think.

Even though he stopped being part of core, he has remained active in Node.js development. It's part of his job at StrongLoop I suppose. A fresh start with an open governance model at least should mean that most politics are set aside.

Except "identity politics" aka inclusiveness are at the heart of their open governance model... Or did you miss the drama over their code of conduct; that they were going to one and how they solicited and followed advice from noted social justice advocates in drafting it.

It confuses me deeply that this fact could turn people off of the project regardless of its other practical and technical merits.

I hope so. Pretty much everyone on that list except isaac and mikeal are apolitical.

Mikeal is overtly political. Isaac is political from time to time since he's strongly aligned with the identity politics mob that attacked ben noordhuis back in the day. I really hope identity politics doesn't creep into the io.js governance.

A great way to stop identity politics becoming an issue is to bring it up unprompted through a throwaway account on Hacker News. Anonymously singling out specific members of the community that you dislike and labeling them as bad actors is particularly helpful.

Oh, wait...

How do we know that Isaac identifies as a "he" ?

The fact that opinions like these are still a thing says more about the opinion than his commitment to the node/io/libuv community. edit: obvious commit statistics below/above.

What happened?

io.js is a fork/continuation of Node.js "unstable" 0.11.x branch. Node.js stable, under Joyent's stewardship, has been stuck in 0.10.x land for over a year.

io.js has many of the top core Node.js contributors. They're trying to move server-side JavaScript forward with open governance, faster release cycles, ES6, etc.

> io.js is a fork/continuation of Node.js

Thanks.

That website needs serious work in terms of wording. Absolutely zero information on the website apart from the extremely vague tagline. I clicked a few links and all I could find was politics. Without the context given on HN I would still be wondering:

Is it a node.js replacement? Is it a NPM replacement? Is it a dog? Is it a cat? Can I eat it?

Even you want to sell something to people (even if that something is free as in beer) they need to know what that something is, first.

completely agree. I didn't even get it was a node replacement. A spork of node? What is that? I might be missing some tech vocabulary, or just some native-english understanding. But the wording could be much more clear.

It will be interesting what Joyent will do with its 0.11 unstable branch and how popular io.js will get.

The merge between the current 0.10.35 branch and the 0.12 branch is almost done (https://github.com/joyent/node/milestones/0.11.15), we can expect version 0.11.15 within then next few days. 0.11.15 will be a release candidate for 0.12.

On the other hand, they've been saying that 0.12 will come out 'soon' for over a year, so this too may take longer than I expect.

As someone who's been waiting for that '0.12 soon' for over a year, io.js releasing as announced is amazing (even more-so is their open communication).

By comparison, @nodejs announced on Dec 17th, 2014 that 0.11.15 was "tomorrow", but still haven't released anything: https://twitter.com/nodejs/status/545349270241435648

Agree...couldn't find a clear explanation anywhere within several clicks of the home page. If it's a fork of node.js with ES6 support, as people are saying, they should put that on the front page or at the top of the FAQ section or on the front page of the documentation.

It's more than that: a lot of people who made node.js to what it is are now working on io.js.

It's more like a new version of node with a different name to circumvent trademark issues.

In a gist, io.js is node.js with faster release cycles using more up-to-date versions of V8 along with an open governance

link to gist?

Here I suppose: https://gist.github.com/maxogden/d96123138522c84cdb25

Nice.

io.js is a program that makes JavaScript run on a server.

io.js is a fork of node.js but is "better" because:

1) io.js always uses the latest JavaScript engine.

2) io.js is not controlled by private interests.

Really? I thought V8 makes JavaScript run on a server.

no, V8 makes javascript run, iojs makes javascript run on server.

So it's useless without V8. I mean I can install Chrome or an Awesomium app onto server and it will also run JavaScript on server (via V8).

And why would you want to do that?

V8 is just a JS engine, it is used in io.js, node.js, chrome, and chromium.

I still cannot figure out what this actually is besides Javascript

Google's v8 is the JavaScript. io.js provides APIs for performing disk and network io, using v8.

Node has IO methods as well...

It's basically a fork of nodejs

It's an implementation of the Reactor Pattern with some package management capability. Not a platform. Not a framework. Not an engine. Just a script.

You could literally say that about anything.

"Rails is just an implementation of the MVC pattern, not a framework."