Node.js implements a flavor of vm.createContext() and friends that creates a context without contextifying its global object when vm.constants.DONT_CONTEXTIFY is used. This is suitable when users want to freeze the context (impossible when the global is contextified i.e. has interceptors installed) or speed up the global access if they don't need the interceptor behavior.

Node.js now supports requiring code coverage to meet a specific threshold before the process exits successfully. To use this feature, you need to enable the --experimental-test-coverage flag.

Starts Node.js in watch mode. When in watch mode, changes in the watched files cause the Node.js process to restart. By default, watch mode will watch the entry point and any required or imported module. Use --watch-path to specify what paths to watch

Loads environment variables from a file relative to the current directory, making them available to applications on process.env. The environment variables which configure Node.js, such as NODE_OPTIONS, are parsed and applied. If the same variable is defined in the environment and in the file, the value from the environment takes precedence.

This release adds a new API module.enableCompileCache() that can be used to enable on-disk code caching of all modules loaded after this API is called. Previously this could only be enabled by the NODE_COMPILE_CACHE environment variable, so it could only set by end-users. This API allows tooling and library authors to enable caching of their own code. This is a built-in alternative to the v8-compile-cache/v8-compile-cache-lib packages, but have better performance and supports ESM.