5 ms·

It's also a rather convoluted set of examples. If you're doing something in Node that takes nontrivial processing time (that doesn't just involve waiting for I

It's also a rather convoluted set of examples. If you're doing something in Node that takes nontrivial processing time (that doesn't just involve waiting for I/O), you're Doing It Wrong (tm). Since the premise of "callback hell" is outdated, the only remaining point is that if you perform complex/time consuming calculations in NodeJS, it slows down. If you want the most speed, or if you're going to be doing something like a Fibonacci calculation, you should write that (microservice) in Go instead. It's faster from the start (by 2x at least, probably a lot more if you're CPU bound), and GoRoutines can be spread across multiple threads, so a multi-CPU host can take advantage of all of its CPUs. Oh, and the per-GoRoutine overhead is only about 4K on a Linux host, last I checked. True that Haskell has a smaller overhead per thread, but considering the speed advantage, I think the Go server would still win big on latency for the number of threads that did actually fit in memory.

innocentoldguy 10y ago
But if you're going to run to Go, Haskell, or something else to write micro-services to handle everything that Node doesn't do well, why not just ditch Node and write everything in that other language, since languages like Go, Haskell, Elixir, and Erlang are better and faster than Node at the things Node is good at as well?
- novembermike 10y ago
  But they aren't always. Go might, but I'd be less sure about Haskell in a fair test and Elixir/Erlang (as much as I love them and prefer them to everything else) are languages with strong benefits and strong drawbacks. Node actually does have some advantages.
  - innocentoldguy 10y ago
    Would you mind sharing some of those advantages of Node, and disadvantages of Elixir/Erlang? It's hard to have a meaningful discussion around vague assertions.
    - SomeCallMeTim 10y ago
      A key advantage that Node has? NPM with 350,000 packages. Granted they aren't all top quality packages, but thousands are. I was working on one project that used ZeroMQ, as a random example. There are excellent packages for Node, including a well maintained version for the newest 4.0 branch. For Elixir, when a team wanted to interface using ZeroMQ, the best they could find was a "work in progress, not ready for production use" build that was a partial re-implementation of ZeroMQ 3.1, and that specifically lacked the elliptic encryption feature that we were using. The more mature ports to Erlang similarly doesn't support the encryption we were using. [1] There's one native binding that seems to only support 3.1 (at most) as well [2], but it's something you need to build and configure, as opposed to "npm install zeromq --save", or better yet, "yarn add zeromq", and then your project will work on any system without any complex build rules to get it working. That's just one package that I tried to use, and it's a popular network message queue package (two full ports to native Erlang!). If I had tried to do something more obscure I'm sure I would have had even more problems. Another key advantage is that there are probably 10x the number of developers ready to hit the ground running on a Node project than there are Go developers, or 50x as many as Elixir or Erlang developers. I don't know if you've tried to do much hiring, but it's hard enough finding developers for a language that's popular. (And no, I'm not counting "front end" JavaScript developers; if I were, I would have said 100x or more.) If you're hiring in an area that isn't highly tech focused, you might not be able to hire a single developer with experience. [1] https://github.com/zeromq/ezmq/issues/31 https://github.com/zeromq/ezmq/issues/31 and https://github.com/chovencorp/chumak https://github.com/chovencorp/chumak (supports only the "NULL" security framework -- there's a note lower down on the page that Curve isn't supported) [2] https://github.com/zeromq/erlzmq2 https://github.com/zeromq/erlzmq2
      - OvermindDL1 10y ago
        Though, to be honest, most Erlang/Elixir devs would never think of using something like ZeroMQ as Erlang has more powerful and built in alternatives, or something like the Elixir Phoenix web framework that has built in much more powerful functionality. That seems to be an aspect of knowing the tools, easy to miss if you are new to the Erlang ecosystem. :-)

innocentoldguy 10y ago

But if you're going to run to Go, Haskell, or something else to write micro-services to handle everything that Node doesn't do well, why not just ditch Node and write everything in that other language, since languages like Go, Haskell, Elixir, and Erlang are better and faster than Node at the things Node is good at as well?

novembermike 10y ago
But they aren't always. Go might, but I'd be less sure about Haskell in a fair test and Elixir/Erlang (as much as I love them and prefer them to everything else) are languages with strong benefits and strong drawbacks. Node actually does have some advantages.
- innocentoldguy 10y ago
  Would you mind sharing some of those advantages of Node, and disadvantages of Elixir/Erlang? It's hard to have a meaningful discussion around vague assertions.
  - SomeCallMeTim 10y ago
    A key advantage that Node has? NPM with 350,000 packages. Granted they aren't all top quality packages, but thousands are. I was working on one project that used ZeroMQ, as a random example. There are excellent packages for Node, including a well maintained version for the newest 4.0 branch. For Elixir, when a team wanted to interface using ZeroMQ, the best they could find was a "work in progress, not ready for production use" build that was a partial re-implementation of ZeroMQ 3.1, and that specifically lacked the elliptic encryption feature that we were using. The more mature ports to Erlang similarly doesn't support the encryption we were using. [1] There's one native binding that seems to only support 3.1 (at most) as well [2], but it's something you need to build and configure, as opposed to "npm install zeromq --save", or better yet, "yarn add zeromq", and then your project will work on any system without any complex build rules to get it working. That's just one package that I tried to use, and it's a popular network message queue package (two full ports to native Erlang!). If I had tried to do something more obscure I'm sure I would have had even more problems. Another key advantage is that there are probably 10x the number of developers ready to hit the ground running on a Node project than there are Go developers, or 50x as many as Elixir or Erlang developers. I don't know if you've tried to do much hiring, but it's hard enough finding developers for a language that's popular. (And no, I'm not counting "front end" JavaScript developers; if I were, I would have said 100x or more.) If you're hiring in an area that isn't highly tech focused, you might not be able to hire a single developer with experience. [1] https://github.com/zeromq/ezmq/issues/31 https://github.com/zeromq/ezmq/issues/31 and https://github.com/chovencorp/chumak https://github.com/chovencorp/chumak (supports only the "NULL" security framework -- there's a note lower down on the page that Curve isn't supported) [2] https://github.com/zeromq/erlzmq2 https://github.com/zeromq/erlzmq2
    - OvermindDL1 10y ago
      Though, to be honest, most Erlang/Elixir devs would never think of using something like ZeroMQ as Erlang has more powerful and built in alternatives, or something like the Elixir Phoenix web framework that has built in much more powerful functionality. That seems to be an aspect of knowing the tools, easy to miss if you are new to the Erlang ecosystem. :-)