This document describes some policies around what is and is not included in the Node.js distribution.
The Node.js distribution includes some external software that the Node.js project does not maintain. The choice to include a particular piece of software should not imply anything about that software relative to its competitors; in some cases, software was added when it had no competitors. While the Node.js project supports and encourages competition in the JavaScript ecosystem, as a policy, the Node.js project does not include multiple dependencies or tools that serve the same purpose.
The following user-accessible external tools or libraries are the ones chosen for their particular purposes:
- JavaScript engine: V8
- Package manager:
npm - Package manager version manager: Corepack
Being user-accessible, removal or replacement of these projects could happen only as a semver-major change, unless the related feature or project is documented as experimental. In addition, Node.js includes external projects as internal dependencies. These may be replaced or removed at any time, provided that doing so is not a breaking change.