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> Java and C# has already been doing multi-threaded web servers for about a decade. Node was single-threaded async, not multi-threaded. The entire point was to

> Java and C# has already been doing multi-threaded web servers for about a decade. Node was single-threaded async, not multi-threaded. The entire point was to not spin up multiple threads and to rely on the event loop instead. > Oh, and C# already had support for async programming too! Node become popular in part because Silicon Valley just doesn't seem to be aware of anything that exists outside it. > And I understand serverside devs from other languages can at this point jump in and say that it's not, that the single-threaded model is possible in other languages, that there are downsides to the single-threaded model, that Node doesn't do it well, whatever. I'm not arguing the point, I'm just describing the cultural shift I saw. Right or wrong, you can go back and look at forum posts even only 6, 7 years ago and you'll see people asking about single-threaded performance and asking how Node manages to scale if it's single-threaded. A lot of developers at that time got introduced to single-threaded event-based asynchronous server programming through Node. I'm not telling you that Node should have won, I'm telling you one of the reasons why it happened to win. Here's Dahl's original slides presenting Node in 2009: https://s3.amazonaws.com/four.livejournal/20091117/jsconf.pdf https://s3.amazonaws.com/four.livejournal/20091117/jsconf.pd... Immediately the first thing he's talking about is not unity between the front-end and backend language or sharing code. It's "I/O needs to be done differently." That's what people were talking about back then.

danShumway 3y ago
Edit: here's the actual presentation, not just the slides: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ztspvPYybIY https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ztspvPYybIY What's interesting about this talk is that Ryan doesn't even mention Javascript at all (other than briefly to say that NodeJS is built on it) until nearly 13 minutes into the presentation. And it's clear that he's using Javascript as a means to an end -- he's going with Javascript largely just because Javascript by default has a single threaded event loop that every JS programmer had to learn to work with it. So he brings up going with JS because JS programmers are used to callbacks already -- and then roughly 2 minutes later he immediately moves back to talking about I/O and request handling again. Very little of his presentation is about Javascript beyond an aside of "JS already does this and JS programmers are used to it, so we might as well go with that and try to copy JS conventions." He almost spends more time talking about common SQL libraries than he spends talking about JS.

danShumway 3y ago

Edit: here's the actual presentation, not just the slides: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ztspvPYybIY https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ztspvPYybIY What's interesting about this talk is that Ryan doesn't even mention Javascript at all (other than briefly to say that NodeJS is built on it) until nearly 13 minutes into the presentation. And it's clear that he's using Javascript as a means to an end -- he's going with Javascript largely just because Javascript by default has a single threaded event loop that every JS programmer had to learn to work with it. So he brings up going with JS because JS programmers are used to callbacks already -- and then roughly 2 minutes later he immediately moves back to talking about I/O and request handling again. Very little of his presentation is about Javascript beyond an aside of "JS already does this and JS programmers are used to it, so we might as well go with that and try to copy JS conventions." He almost spends more time talking about common SQL libraries than he spends talking about JS.