Tracing, streams, and net saw the biggest platform changes
Node gained a new Perfetto-backed tracing agent and build support, marking a major tracing backend addition. In parallel, iterable streams moved to a byte-budget backpressure model, with updates across push(), share(), broadcast(), and related docs/tests. On the network side, net.BoundSocket now supports Unix domain sockets and named pipes via path, and Windows socket handle transfer is now allowed for net.Socket and net.Server.
Crypto, FFI, and zlib got a round of correctness and safety fixes
Crypto work focused on both performance and hardening: KEM encapsulation avoids extra copies, provider-backed private keys are cleansed before free, RSA-PSS legacy DER export is preserved, and malformed/incomplete key exports now fail cleanly. FFI got several boundary fixes, including single-read wrapper signatures, better integer validation, reentrant string-buffer handling, and preserved uint8 semantics for boolean returns. Zstd/zlib also picked up safer input handling, including safe-integer validation for pledgedSrcSize, truncated-stream EOF reporting fixes, and ArrayBuffer dictionary support.
SQLite, DNS, and REPL behavior were tightened up
SQLite database/session lifetimes are now guarded so callbacks and sessions can’t outlive their backing database objects. DNS reverse lookups now ignore hosts files and use PTR/DNS behavior only, while dns.setServers() was modernized to use the newer c-ares CSV API. The REPL also gained basic syntax highlighting, making interactive use more polished without changing semantics.
Other misc changes
- Permission audit mode now logs denials instead of throwing them.
http.request({ highWaterMark })now applies backpressure correctly before socket connect.- Web Streams transfer/adapters and stream iterators got several teardown and abort fixes.
process.binding('buffer').copyArrayBuffer()and other internal paths picked up bounds/lifetime fixes.- Docs cleanup touched crypto, QUIC, streams, DNS, release guidance, and deprecation codemods.