Meteor 3.2 Finally Fixed My Biggest Gripe (And It’s About Time)

I’ve had a love-hate relationship with Meteor since 2015. It was the framework that made me feel like a wizard—writing one language for client and server, reactive data everywhere, zero config. Then came the “dark years.” You know the ones. The years where Node.js moved forward, and Meteor got stuck in a weird limbo relying on fibers to fake synchronous code while the rest of the JavaScript world embraced Promises.

It was messy. I actually stopped recommending it for new projects around 2023 because the technical debt was piling up faster than my unread Slack notifications. The build times were creeping up, and integrating modern npm packages felt like hacking a mainframe from the 90s.

But I decided to give the latest release, Meteor 3.2 (dropped earlier this month), a spin on a side project. I went in ready to be annoyed. I expected to hit the usual walls.

Well, that’s not entirely accurate — I didn’t. Instead, I found myself staring at a terminal window that actually respected my time.

The Death of Fibers (Finally)

For the uninitiated, Meteor used to rely on a binary package called fibers to make database calls look synchronous. It was magic until it wasn’t. It broke every time Node updated. It caused random segfaults on Alpine Linux. It was the technical debt that kept on giving.

The big news with the 3.x cycle—and specifically polished in this 3.2 release—is that the band-aid is ripped off. We are fully native async/await now. No wrappers. No binary hacks. Just standard JavaScript.

Here is what a method looks like now. Notice the standard async syntax. If you tried this in 2020, you would have been laughed out of the room.

import { Meteor } from 'meteor/meteor';
import { check } from 'meteor/check';
import { Inventory } from '/imports/api/inventory';

Meteor.methods({
  // Native async is now the default. No more this.unblock() voodoo needed.
  async 'inventory.updateQuantity'(itemId, newQuantity) {
    check(itemId, String);
    check(newQuantity, Number);

    if (!this.userId) {
      throw new Meteor.Error('not-authorized');
    }

    // This is standard Node.js await now. 
    // No Fiber wrapper overhead.
    const item = await Inventory.findOneAsync(itemId);

    if (!item) {
      throw new Meteor.Error('item-not-found');
    }

    // The database operations are cleaner and standard
    const result = await Inventory.updateAsync(itemId, {
      $set: { quantity: newQuantity, updatedAt: new Date() }
    });

    return result;
  }
});

See that findOneAsync? That’s the ticket. In previous versions, we had this awkward mix where some things were sync (via Fibers) and some were async. Now, the API surface is consistent. It feels like writing modern backend code, not “Meteor code.”

Performance: Not Just a Feeling

I’m skeptical of “faster” claims. Marketing teams love to say “2x faster” because they ran a Hello World on a supercomputer. So I ran my own benchmark using a real-world SaaS dashboard I maintain (about 45k lines of code).

I upgraded the app from Meteor 2.16 to 3.2. It wasn’t a one-click upgrade (more on that in a second), but the results on my M3 Pro MacBook were startling:

• Cold Build Time: Dropped from 4m 12s to 1m 45s.
• Rebuild Time (HMR): Went from ~4.5s to under 800ms.
• Bundle Size: Shaved off 180kb just by dropping the legacy compatibility packages.

The rebuild time is the killer here. Waiting 4 seconds every time you save a file breaks your flow. 800ms? That’s fast enough that by the time I Command-Tab to the browser, it’s already refreshed.

The “Gotcha” You Need to Know

It’s not all sunshine. If you have a massive legacy codebase, this upgrade is going to hurt a little. Or a lot.

The removal of Fibers means every single server-side database call needs to be converted to use await and the *Async methods. Collection.find() works, but Collection.findOne() needs to be Collection.findOneAsync(). If you miss one, your app won’t crash—it just returns a Promise object instead of the data, and your logic fails silently downstream.

I spent about three hours chasing a bug where my user profile wasn’t loading, only to realize I had missed a findOne inside a helper function. The error wasn’t “Method not found,” it was just undefined passing through the system.

Here is a quick snippet I used to patch my publications. You have to be explicit now:

// server/publications.js

Meteor.publish('user.orders', async function () {
  if (!this.userId) return this.ready();

  // Old way: return Orders.find({ userId: this.userId });
  // It still works for cursors, BUT if you need to fetch data to determine the query...
  
  const userSettings = await Settings.findOneAsync({ userId: this.userId });
  
  if (userSettings?.isRestricted) {
    return [];
  }

  return Orders.find({ userId: this.userId });
});

Why This Matters Now

For a long time, choosing Meteor felt like choosing technical debt. You got speed of development upfront, but you paid for it later when you couldn’t upgrade Node.js because the binary bindings were broken.

With 3.2 running on Node 22.11.0 (LTS), that debt is gone. I can finally use top-level await. I can use the latest drivers for MongoDB 7.0 without weird hacks. It feels like the framework has finally caught up to the promise it made ten years ago.

Is it perfect? No. The ecosystem is smaller than the React/Next.js juggernaut. But for building data-heavy, real-time apps quickly? It’s back in my toolkit.

If you’ve been holding off on upgrading or left the ecosystem entirely, take a look at the migration guide. It’s tedious work converting those sync calls, but the performance gains on the other side are actually real this time.