3 ms·

We are no longer in the 90s. The code has increased in volume a hundredfold and it comes from literally everywhere. You can no longer trust everything on your m

We are no longer in the 90s. The code has increased in volume a hundredfold and it comes from literally everywhere. You can no longer trust everything on your machine or your network to be bug-free or otherwise non-hostile. Creating a system in the 21st century that tries to follow ideals from the 90s gives us the kind of idiotism that we can witness here.

jerf 7y ago
I think you may have misinterpreted earthboundkid; the claim isn't that it worked in the 90s, the claim is that it was already broken in the 90s. You are otherwise on the right track, though Node does technically have one advantage, which is that it is a cooperatively-scheduled island in a preemptively-scheluded overall OS. In the 1990s, when the cooperatively-scheduled program was not cooperative, you locked the machine, not the process [1]. There is a reason why Apple went very aggressive with the OSX rewrite; the previous Systems had basically written themselves into a corner where they had to use cooperative multitasking because so much code made use of the implicit promises it provides, yet they could no longer afford to compete with Microsoft if they didn't get off it it, because the complexity just kept going up, up, up and the problem was going to continue getting exponentially worse. For a Node program, you only have to account for the Node program itself, not everything running on the computer. Still, you're in the same exponentially-growing-complexity trap (with a very initially-safe-seeming low exponent, but it still gets you in the end), you just reset yourself back to a point earlier on the curve. [1] There are various details, caveats, interrupts, etc, the picture is more complicated than one sentence can convey, but the principle still held and it was still possible to wedge the machine fairly badly for varying periods of time with simple bad code.
winrid 7y ago
I mean, if you write slow code in a high throughput environment you'll just kill the CPU from context switching between threads instead. It doesn't matter if it's in an event loop or thread per request. Architect things correctly.
reaperducer 7y ago
If I thought my bank was running thousands of node containers in parallel to handle transactions, I think I'd look for a new bank.

jerf 7y ago

I think you may have misinterpreted earthboundkid; the claim isn't that it worked in the 90s, the claim is that it was already broken in the 90s. You are otherwise on the right track, though Node does technically have one advantage, which is that it is a cooperatively-scheduled island in a preemptively-scheluded overall OS. In the 1990s, when the cooperatively-scheduled program was not cooperative, you locked the machine, not the process [1]. There is a reason why Apple went very aggressive with the OSX rewrite; the previous Systems had basically written themselves into a corner where they had to use cooperative multitasking because so much code made use of the implicit promises it provides, yet they could no longer afford to compete with Microsoft if they didn't get off it it, because the complexity just kept going up, up, up and the problem was going to continue getting exponentially worse. For a Node program, you only have to account for the Node program itself, not everything running on the computer. Still, you're in the same exponentially-growing-complexity trap (with a very initially-safe-seeming low exponent, but it still gets you in the end), you just reset yourself back to a point earlier on the curve. [1] There are various details, caveats, interrupts, etc, the picture is more complicated than one sentence can convey, but the principle still held and it was still possible to wedge the machine fairly badly for varying periods of time with simple bad code.

winrid 7y ago

I mean, if you write slow code in a high throughput environment you'll just kill the CPU from context switching between threads instead. It doesn't matter if it's in an event loop or thread per request. Architect things correctly.

reaperducer 7y ago

If I thought my bank was running thousands of node containers in parallel to handle transactions, I think I'd look for a new bank.