rclnodejs v1.8.1 Release (2026-01-22)

We are pleased to announce rclnodejs v1.8.1! This patch release focuses on improving stability, fixing critical bugs related to concurrency and Electron compatibility, and significantly enhancing test coverage and reliability.

🐛 Bug Fixes

Critical Race Condition Fix (#1372)

• Resolved a crash (SIGABRT / "pure virtual method called") that occurred when calling setContentFilter() while the node was spinning.
• Solution: The fix enforces a thread-safe pattern. Users should stop the node before modifying content filters and restart it afterwards.

Electron Compatibility (#1375, #1379)

• File System Operations: Replaced fs.access() with fs.stat() for file existence checks. This ensures compatibility with Electron's ASAR packaging system, where fs.access can sometimes fail.
• Demo Updates: Updated Electron demos to use Electron v40.0.0 and fixed type issues in the turtle_tf2 demo by using BigInt for timer periods.

Message Type Correctness (#1371)

• Time.toMsg(): Corrected the return type of Time.toMsg(). It now returns JavaScript numbers instead of BigInts for sec and nanosec fields, aligning correctly with the ROS 2 builtin_interfaces/msg/Time specification.

Stability Improvements

• Content Filtering: Fixed memory allocation bugs (using wrong size calculation) and improved error handling in content filter operations (#1369).
• Flaky Tests: Resolved test flakiness in type-description-service and content filtering tests (#1367, #1369).

🧪 Enhancements & Infrastructure

• Test Coverage: Major effort to improve unit test coverage. Added comprehensive tests for core modules like utils.js, client.js, logging.js, and timer.js, achieving >80% coverage (#1363).
• Windows CI: Fixed GitHub Actions failures on Windows by explicitly configuring Python 3.11 (#1376).
• Dependencies: Updated globals package to v17.0.0 (#1365).

Full Changelog: 1.8.0...1.8.1