[eurleif]

Node.js actually had no parallelism at the start, other than the ability to manually spawn new processes. Worker threads were only added in 2018 with v10.5.0, and only stabilized in 2019 with v12.

What Node.js had from the start was concurrency via asynchronous IO. And before Node.js was around to be JavaScript's async IO framework, there was a robust async IO framework for Python called Twisted. Node.js was influenced by Twisted[0], and this is particularly evident in the design of its Promise abstraction (which you had to use directly when it was first released, because JavaScript didn't add the async/await keywords until years later).

[0] https://nodejs.org/en/about

[frollogaston]

I was referring to the async io from the start, not worker threads. Other langs had their own frameworks for this, including Twisted for Python, but it really makes a difference having that stuff built-in and default.

[eurleif]

Async IO is concurrency, not parallelism. And Node.JS is simply a framework for JavaScript, like Twisted is a framework for Python. If you compare a framework to a language, then of course the framework has more stuff built in; but that's hardly a fair comparison.

[frollogaston]

NodeJS is a separate runtime. It's not really the same language either since import syntax differs from web JS and the standard libs are different. Or in practical terms, you can't copy a lot of browser JS code and expect it to work in NodeJS as-is.

But that's beside the point. Performant web backends are way easier to deal with in NodeJS than in Python. I'm not comparing to Twisted because, even though it looks good, every Python backend I've ever seen was either plain Python or Django, which was also a mess compared to Express.