Explain to me like I'm 5 years old - what benefits did Meteor 1.2 bring?

jononomo · October 19, 2015, 12:25pm

Ok, so I’ve just gone through a painful process of updating to Meteor 1.2. (It was painful mainly because nemo64:bootstrap broke). Now that I’m on the new version I don’t notice any difference at all. If anything, my build times are slower when I change a file. So what benefits am I actually experiencing without realizing it? Thanks.

lucfranken · October 19, 2015, 12:37pm

The release notes are always updated with every release:

github.com

meteor/meteor/blob/devel/History.md

## v.NEXT

* The `meteor-babel` npm package (along with its Babel-related
  dependencies) has been updated to version 7.0.0-beta.35, a major update
  from Babel 6. Thanks to the strong abstraction of the `meteor-babel`
  package, the most noticeable consequence of the Babel 7 upgrade is that
  the `babel-runtime` npm package has been replaced by `@babel/runtime`,
  which can be installed by running
  ```js
  meteor npm install @babel/runtime
  ```
  in your application directory. There's a good chance that the old
  `babel-runtime` package can be removed from your `package.json`
  dependencies, though there's no harm in leaving it there. Please see
  [this blog post](https://babeljs.io/blog/2017/09/12/planning-for-7.0)
  for general information about updating to Babel 7 (note especially any
  changes to plugins you've been using in any `.babelrc` files).
  [PR #9440](https://github.com/meteor/meteor/pull/9440)

* The previously served `/manifest.json` application metadata file is now

This file has been truncated. show original

there you can see the differences between versions.

jononomo · October 19, 2015, 12:40pm

Thanks, I guess. That really seems geared toward 7-8 year olds, though.

lucfranken · October 19, 2015, 12:43pm

In what sense? It contains lots of important fixes for people using specific features. Also the native support of for example ES6 makes a big difference. It’s a lot of low level technical stuff though, not a lot of features. So maybe not the most shiny but certainly an important release.

Many people are fighting it though since it stronger enforces the rules. It allows less errors in packages like not defining the right packages being used, which generates errors.

jononomo · October 19, 2015, 12:46pm

Thanks - I guess ES6 is important. Curious, though - do we have to worry about whether certain browsers support ES6?

Sanjo · October 19, 2015, 1:21pm

No. Because the ES2015 (ES6) code that you write gets converted to browser compatible code (= ES5 + polyfills).

ffxsam · October 19, 2015, 3:07pm

Yes and no. There are still some things I noticed that do not work (last I checked), such as Object.assign and Symbol. In fact, if I use Symbol in my code, Meteor won’t even run my app without errors.

jononomo · October 19, 2015, 5:03pm

Another thing I’ve noticed is that with version 1.2 mupx takes about 4 times as long to deploy my app to Digital Ocean as it did with version 1.1.

tjmonsi · October 19, 2015, 5:07pm

I didn’t notice this though… Or maybe i just put my wait time longer. Anyway, i guess it really is because of es6. And of course decoupling a lot of things