Updating App Engine with more new runtimes: Nodejs 12, Go 1.13, PHP 7.3 and Python 3.8

Last week, we announced that the Java 11 runtime for App Engine standard environment is now generally available. But that’s not all the App Engine news we have to share. In addition to Java 11, developers can also now use Nodejs 12, Go 1.13, PHP 7.3 and Python 3.8. These latest additions to App Engine mean that you can build applications with your favorite tools, libraries and frameworks with today’s most popular languages.

Nodejs 12 (beta)
Nodejs 12 entered into long-term support (LTS) on October 22, 2019, and it’s now available in beta on App Engine. Node 12 boasts a big upgrade to the V8 Javascript engine to version 7.4, helping your applications run faster than they did on prior Node versions. The most anticipated feature of the release, however, is dedicated support for async stack traces—making it easier to debug code with asynchronous call frames. In addition, worker threads move out of experimental, TLS 1.3 is now supported, and there’s a new default http parser. Check out this post from the Node Foundation for the full list of features. And if you’re ready to get started, give it a try on App Engine.

Go 1.13 (beta)
Try out the latest improvements to Go with the launch of Go 1.13 on App Engine, now in beta. This release makes Go’s new “modules” the default method of managing dependencies in Go, reducing the complexity and the amount of code previously required to vendor imports. Go 1.13 also improves memory management dramatically. In production workloads, users are broadly reporting decreases of 20% - 50% in memory footprint. 

PHP 7.3 (GA)
PHP 7.3 is also now generally available. This latest version of PHP adds full support for LDAP controls, improves logging for the Fast CGI Process Manager, and simplifies working with multibyte strings, among other changes. All of these new features are available today on App Engine. Just upload your PHP source code, and we’ll run it for you without having to manage a single VM or server.

Python 3.8 (beta)
Finally, we’re announcing the availability of Python 3.8 in beta. Python 3.8 introduces a new assignment operator (walrus), positional-only arguments in function definitions, better debugging support for f-strings via the '=' specifier, multiprocess shared memory, and many more improvements. It also features performance enhancements such as speeding up many built-in methods by eliminating unnecessary argument conversions, and utilizing a new parallel filesystem cache for compiled bytecode files.

With App Engine, you get the best of both worlds: the modern, idiomatic runtimes and frameworks you love, coupled with the fully managed, pay-as-you-go simplicity of a serverless platform. You write the code; let us worry about running your infrastructure. All of these new runtimes are now available on App Engine. Give them a try today.