As others have pointed out, V8 is the place where low-level JVM-like things like hotspot compilation and garbage collection happen, and you’ll find most of thos

As others have pointed out, V8 is the place where low-level JVM-like things like hotspot compilation and garbage collection happen, and you’ll find most of those discussions under that label. From a high-level perspective, the main simplification/complication with NodeJS and JavaScript is that it’s a single thread running in a loop, so significant amounts of work need to be moved off-thread to keep the main thread performant. This is where the “architecture” really comes in in my opinion (and is what makes NodeJS look “simple”: Everything complex is “outsourced”!) Deciding where that “outsourced” work will happen (workers, other node instances, database, etc.) and how will it be managed/monitored (queues and messages for example) is really the main architecture work of using NodeJS.