Minimum node version requirement: >=16.6.0

[iCrawl]

Starting with v13.0.0 the minimum node version requirement for discord.js will be >=16.6.0 to make use of features like optional chaining, (ES2021) etc.

Benefits:

• Full access to ES2021 features

Drawbacks:

• Dropping node 12 support
• Dropping node 14 support

[ElianCordoba]

Another drawback is that Node 14 is marked as beta in Firebase functions. Not your fault of course, it's little bit scary to make the upgrade.

[kyranet]

Node.js v14 is also LTS, not bleeding edge, alpha, nor beta; it's stable and it's the recommended version, which makes it a reasonable target:

Either way, by the time we release discord.js@13.0.0, Firebase and other hosting platforms should be updated, and if not, there'll most likely be a margin of a couple of months to upgrade (before v12 stops working due to v6 and v7 shutdown on Discord's side), if not, that'll be unfortunate, but Node.js v14 comes with new JavaScript features that improve the entire library's maintainability, stability, and to some extent, also performance.

[ElianCordoba]

Yeah I always though that hosting platforms not encouringing, or even worse, not offering new versions of the runtimes would basically hold back a big chunk of the ecosystem.

[LevitatingBusinessMan]

Nice, my bot still runs on node 8 and discord.js 11
But I think discord.js 11 just broke a few days back....

[PyroTechniac]

v11 hasn't been supported in a long time, and was recently broken permanently with the addition of stage channels