I'm not 100% on whether this is serious or not, but what the hell: 1. My recent installs of node have required compiling from source to get anything remotely u

I'm not 100% on whether this is serious or not, but what the hell: 1. My recent installs of node have required compiling from source to get anything remotely up-to-date, however there are packages for both, 2. Composer with the Packagist registry is comparable here - you might be thinking of PEAR. 3. JS certainly has much better async support - it being JavaScript after all. 4. PHP has JSON encoding/decoding bundled, no third party lib required. 5. For better or worse