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A failing with programmers is we tend to focus on solutions rather than problems. Perhaps it's partly because, to be a good programmer, you need to immerse your
by 6ren 15y ago
A failing with programmers is we tend to focus on solutions rather than problems. Perhaps it's partly because, to be a good programmer, you need to immerse yourself in the code. Unfortunately, this takes your attention away from the bigger problem that the code solves.
In this article, it's interesting that though "Node solves a problem" is stressed as key to its success, compared with the many other JS server-side projects, they don't explicitly mention the problem, except obliquely at the end! (The problem is efficiently handling massive concurrencies in network connections.)
It's because of this short-sightedness of programmers that there will always be easy pickings available to anyone who actually looks at problem. Be a problem-person, not a solution-person.
- jshen 15y agoAnd it doesn't define "massive" :/ I still don't see a compelling reason to use node. I think the jvm is a better choice all around.
- superjared 15y ago"Massive" in this case is terribly subjective. I think the typical definition is concurrency between 10k and 50k. Whereas when we (at Urban Airship) wanted to hit 500k, the only reasonable way to do that without resorting to pure C was by using the JVM.
- baudehlo 15y agoIt depends what your clients are doing. I've written perl servers (using epoll) that can cope with 300k concurrent connections, as long as they're not all talking at once. I've written perl servers coping with 50k concurrent connections where they are all talking at once too. And v8 is MUCH faster than Perl.
- jshen 15y agoAnd slower than the JVM
- baudehlo 15y agoMeh, sure basic operations are always going to be slower due to lack of type information, but for most work it's going to be pretty close to the JVM in terms of I/O, database access, etc. For compute specific tasks, sure it may not be the right tool for the job.
- jshen 15y agoI'll be that clojure is faster and it isn't statically typed. I have far more confidence in the JVM handling heavy load that V8 which wasn't designed as a server side technology.