Those are decent points, but I'd think Io.js would have more reasons. First of all, if you implement a polyfill in JavaScript, it'll be translated into pretty

Those are decent points, but I'd think Io.js would have more reasons. First of all, if you implement a polyfill in JavaScript, it'll be translated into pretty fast native code. But even if it didn't, most(?) of Node's core libraries are written in plain JavaScript and presumably are as fast as any module in npm. Take a look: https://github.com/joyent/node/blob/master/lib/buffer.js https://github.com/joyent/node/blob/master/lib/buffer.js And if you really want optimized native code, npm supports that out of the box. I kinda dislike npm modules that require a compilation step, but they're out there. As for robustness, there's nothing stopping one to making robust node modules that are not in the core.