Download Meteor 1.8

Meteor is a JavaScript framework with server-side and client-side support, in which you can develop complete web applications for Linux, Windows, macOS, Android and iOS, including support for databases such as MongoDB. Node.js is used for the server side, jQuery for the client side. For more information, please refer to this page† The development team has released version 1.8 of Meteor with the following announcement:

Meteor 1.8 erases the debts of 1.7
Delayed legacy builds, lazy plugins, meteor create –react, Babel 7, Mongo 4, and more

It’s no secret that rebuild times increased with Meteor 1.7. Building an entirely new client bundle for legacy browsers takes time, after all. We were fully aware of this performance regression when we released Meteor 1.7, yet the promise of liberating modern browsers from the oppressive constraints of legacy compatibility seemed worth incurring some technical debt, as long as we had a plan for paying down those debts in the future .

Well, it’s the future now, and Meteor 1.8 is the culmination of that plan.

Not only have we eliminated many of the performance problems specific to Meteor 1.7, we also dug deep into the historical internals of Meteor’s compiler plugin system, as far back as version 1.2 (September 2015!) to reap some pretty impressive build time improvements, all without compromising our fundamental design constraints.

in summary

With 453 commits over five months of development, Meteor 1.8 preserves, extends, and patches the groundbreaking features of Meteor 1.7, with vastly better build performance. If you’re already using 1.7, you should definitely run meteor update at your earliest convenience. If you’re still running Meteor 1.6 because 1.7 was too slow, or you had trouble updating for any reason, feel free to skip directly to Meteor 1.8. If you’re coming from an even older version of Meteor, see the migration guide.

As always, please have a look at the full release notes for details that may be particularly relevant to your applications.