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nodejs/doc/api/documentation.md
Rich Trott 956e08e6f0 doc: remove experimental status for JSON documentation
The JSON documentation is relied up on by some consumers. It has been in
Experimental status for a long time. Promote it to Stable.

Reword the JSON documentation overview for brevity and clarity.

PR-URL: https://github.com/nodejs/node/pull/27842
Reviewed-By: Colin Ihrig <cjihrig@gmail.com>
Reviewed-By: Сковорода Никита Андреевич <chalkerx@gmail.com>
Reviewed-By: Yongsheng Zhang <zyszys98@gmail.com>
Reviewed-By: Trivikram Kamat <trivikr.dev@gmail.com>
2019-05-25 21:09:38 -07:00

2.9 KiB

About this Documentation

Welcome to the official API reference documentation for Node.js!

Node.js is a JavaScript runtime built on the V8 JavaScript engine.

Contributing

Report errors in this documentation in the issue tracker. See the contributing guide for directions on how to submit pull requests.

Stability Index

Throughout the documentation are indications of a section's stability. Some APIs are so proven and so relied upon that they are unlikely to ever change at all. Others are brand new and experimental, or known to be hazardous.

The stability indices are as follows:

Stability: 0 - Deprecated. The feature may emit warnings. Backward compatibility is not guaranteed.

Stability: 1 - Experimental. This feature is still under active development and subject to non-backward compatible changes or removal in any future version. Use of the feature is not recommended in production environments. Experimental features are not subject to the Node.js Semantic Versioning model.

Stability: 2 - Stable. Compatibility with the npm ecosystem is a high priority.

Use caution when making use of Experimental features, particularly within modules that are dependencies (or dependencies of dependencies) within a Node.js application. End users may not be aware that experimental features are being used, and may experience unexpected failures or behavior changes when API modifications occur. To help avoid such surprises, Experimental features may require a command-line flag to enable them, or may emit a process warning. By default, such warnings are printed to stderr and may be handled by attaching a listener to the 'warning' event.

JSON Output

Every .html document has a corresponding .json document. This is for IDEs and other utilities that consume the documentation.

Syscalls and man pages

System calls like open(2) and read(2) define the interface between user programs and the underlying operating system. Node.js functions which wrap a syscall, like fs.open(), will document that. The docs link to the corresponding man pages (short for manual pages) which describe how the syscalls work.

Most Unix syscalls have Windows equivalents, but behavior may differ on Windows relative to Linux and macOS. For an example of the subtle ways in which it's sometimes impossible to replace Unix syscall semantics on Windows, see Node.js issue 4760.