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Brilliant news for the entire node ecosystem! Having two competing implementations would not be ideal (even if they both support NPM). I hope under this new structure, the development will work at the speed of io.js. Well done to everyone involved!

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I disagree. Having more than one competing implementation following the same standard would have been awesome. How likely it is that they would have followed the same standard rather than each branching off incompatibly is another question entirely...

The problem was that Node was based on a way older version of V8 with little sign of being ready to move on in the near future, and io.js users had access to all sorts of new features, so it was not a good thing for library authors - either you use the new features, and nobody using Node can use your library anymore, or you keep compatibility and have no advantage over just having Node.

They weren't really different implementations anywa - io.js was based on Node and most of the work they had done (as far as I know) was the move to the newer V8 engine version. So they were the same thing, just partially incompatible!

So it's really a great thing that they're merging, because it means that many more people can start actually using the new stuff!

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