[wonnage]

The whole target of his dissatisfaction is this quote on the Node home page: "Almost no function in Node directly performs I/O, so the process never blocks. Because nothing blocks, less-than-expert programmers are able to develop fast systems." That's bullshit. Evented programming isn't some magical fairy dust. If your request handler takes 500ms to run, you're not going to somehow serve more than two requests per second, node or no node. It's blocked on your request handling.

And all that stuff Apache does for you? Well, you get to have fun setting that up in front of the nodejs server. Your sysadmin will love you.

Basically if you're doing a lot of file/network IO that would normally block, node is great. You can do stuff while it's blocked, and callbacks are easier to pick up and handle than threads. But how often does that happen? Personally my Rails app spends about 10% of its time in the DB and the rest slowly generating views (and running GC, yay). AKA CPU-bound work. AKA stuff Node is just as slow at handling, with a silly deployment process to boot.

[exogen]

Whoa, whoa. "Just as slow at handling?" It's most likely an order of magnitude faster at handling those.

But you're right, deployment isn't a totally solved problem. Unless you just use Heroku: http://devcenter.heroku.com/articles/node-js

I mean, Node was created in 2009. I don't see anybody bragging about how easy it is to deploy yet; just that it's fast and easy to understand.

[Tichy]

V8 is a lot faster than Ruby, so I'd expect page rendering to be a lot faster with Node than with Ruby (supposing both use good rendering engines).

Also it seems a lot easier to "outsource" computationally intensive tasks to other processes with Node than with Rails. With node you can stall the response until you receive a result of the computation (within limits), and use the wait time for other tasks. With Rails if you do that, you block one thread of your limited pool of threads. As an example: with my first Heroku Rails app (free hosting) I discovered the pool of threads was one.

[rbranson]

That's a limitation of Rails, not Ruby. One could use Node.js in the same manner. Ruby has been doing async I/O in the form of EventMachine longer than Node.js has even existed.

[Tichy]

NodeJS builds on some C async framework, so pretty much every language build on C could go the Node route - but it would be a lot of work. Personally I wish somebody would adapt it for Arc - or maybe not, so that if I ever apply to YC again I can do that for bonus points :-)

EventMachine is OK, I suppose, but I have heard that it has some warts. Are there any good web frameworks that build on EventMachine? Though I suppose the basic Sinatra-Style framework would not be that hard to build...

[mnutt]

As of 1.3, Sinatra can do streaming using an evented webserver like Thin, which uses EventMachine. Goliath may also be worth checking out.