Rename nextTick

[pspi]

The nextTick function doesn't do what the name states, as it is more of like "current tick", or "from C++ into JS land". How about renaming it to something better?

[bnoordhuis]

Flat out renaming it would break a lot of existing code so that's a no-go. Aliasing it is a possibility but that seems fairly pointless to me.

[jwueller]

I do not think adding an alias would improve things. This has been part of the API for quite a while and would probably not get hard-deprecated for an equally long time as a result of that. People are already confused about the differences between setImmediate(fn), setTimeout(fn, 0) and process.nextTick(fn). If hard-deprecation is unlikely, an alias is only going to add to this confusion.

[rvagg]

I think we can confidently say that there's it's not going to be renamed. It was an accident of history that's baked (like, in a very hot kiln for a very long time) in to Node for all time. Documentation and education are the means we've been using to correct the mistake and that's all we can rely on. I agree with @jwueller that an alias isn't going to improve the situation and will just make the API more messy.

[pspi]

I was under the impression that following semver allows us to easily do breaking changes. I'd vote for fixing the past mistake now.

[bnoordhuis]

Semver lets us advertise breaking changes, that's true. It doesn't mean we're fond of introducing changes that break half of the ecosystem.