[MrBuddyCasino]

Sure it will handle CRUD just fine, like PHP did for all those years, but thats a low standard to measure yourself against. ECMAScript 6 does look kinda decent, but thats the future, not the present.

Also, why use it (Node.js) on the server? Its not even that fast, 21th on the techempower Json benchmark, which should be its strongest discipline (all I/O, no computation, emitting Json).

[kaoD]

> Also, why use it (Node.js) on the server? Its not even that fast

Not only it's still reasonably fast (21st is great, it's mostly surpassed only by C and Java), but it also has a much better ecosystem than most platforms (especially C and Java), it's faster to develop in (especially C and Java) and shares language with client side.

Sharing a common codebase is very important for me. I found in most of my web projects I'm reusing code between server and client. Ever worked with code that does (or should do) the same thing in different codebases? It's just a nightmare.

Having the same React code be rendered in the server (fast, SEO-friendly) and in the client (offloads resources off the server) is just too good.

NodeJS looks like a decent compromise to me, isn't it?

[MrBuddyCasino]

I agree it is reasonably fast. I don't agree its ecosystem is better than Javas, neither in size nor in quality.

Same language is an advantage, so is development speed, I agree.

But: C++, Java, Lua, Ur, Go, Ruby and Erlang are all faster than JS, and especially Ruby is a much nicer language. I don't hate Node.js, it has its sweet spots and the tooling feels nice and lightweight, but its not (yet) a very good general purpose tool. Its just not yet on the sane part of the hype curve, and I don't want to be the guy who has to maintain that callback hell 5 years from now.

But ECMAScript 6 is definitely moving into the right direction.

[kaoD]

> C++, Java, Lua, Ur, Go, Ruby and Erlang are all faster than JS

Wrong column. You're looking at languages, but a language does not affect performance: its platform does. E.g., the only Ruby benchmark which is faster than Node is actually JRuby, i.e. Java.

> and especially Ruby is a much nicer language

That's a matter of preference. I don't like Ruby myself (nor most languages encouraging classes as their primary constructs).

You shouldn't evaluate languages, but platforms.

> but its not (yet) a very good general purpose tool

Why? I mean, no tool is a very good general purpose tool, but what makes NodeJS worse as a tool than, say, Ruby?

> I don't want to be the guy who has to maintain that callback hell 5 years from now.

Neither do I. That's why I don't use JavaScript for anything else than a target language. You seem to like ES6, why don't you use it and transpile it to plain JS?

Platforms, not languages.

[dragonwriter]

> You're looking at languages, but a language does not affect performance: its platform does.

Both language and platform affect performance, otherwise JRuby would be the same speed as native Java, which is not the case.

> E.g., the only Ruby benchmark which is faster than Node is actually JRuby, i.e. Java.

Which still means that Ruby (as a language, using the JRuby implementation) can be faster than Node (assuming the benchmark at issue is meaningful at all.)

> That's a matter of preference. Anyways, you shouldn't evaluate languages, but platforms.

Since you actually need to choose languages to use, you absolutely should evaluate them. You should, of course, also evaluate platforms since you need to choose those, too (and part of evaluating languages is evaluating the constraints language choices put on platform choices, and vice versa.)

[kaoD]

> Both language and platform affect performance, otherwise JRuby would be the same speed as native Java, which is not the case.

No. JRuby is the platform, that's why JRuby is not the same speed as native Java.

But CoffeeScript has the same speed as plain JavaScript, because both are running over the same platform (NodeJS) even if they're different languages.

It just happens JRuby can only run a single language (Ruby).

> Which still means that Ruby (as a language, using the JRuby implementation) can be faster than Node (assuming the benchmark at issue is meaningful at all.)

Ruby is neither fast nor slow. Languages don't have speed.

> Since you actually need to choose languages to use, you absolutely should evaluate them.

Of course, but you shouldn't evaluate languages on their speed, because then you're measuring something completely unrelated to the language. You can measure platform speed (and the constraints they put on languages you can choose), not the other way around.

---

So, to sum it up, software engineering is all about compromises. Dismissing NodeJS because it ranks 21st in a benchmark is a bit shortsighted.

Of course Java and C are going to beat JS at speed, but... do you want to deal with Java's interfacing mess? Do you want to deal with C's manual memory management? I certainly don't. Especially for a web app.

[cheepin]

I'd like to disagree. The language specifications provide various limits on the kind of performance you can get, regardless of the platform.

Performancewise, for the record, I find JavaScript to be wholly adequate for writing servers, but to say that the platform is what makes it slow(er) doesn't ring true to me. For example, JavaScript has a few poor design decisions that make implementing performant arrays really hard. Some other interpreted languages get this right, and their performance can be (and usually is) much better in that regard. However, this is kind of splitting hairs since you only care about its performance on whatever environment on which you are running it.

[LunaSea]

> I don't agree its ecosystem is better than Javas, neither in size nor in quality.

Size is a fact:

http://www.modulecounts.com/

And Ruby is definitely not faster than JavaScript.

[rezistik]

A lot of work really can be boiled down to CRUD though.

For more advanced stuff, it's great for prototyping ideas, in fact I think that's where it really excels. It's a super simple language with a massive ecosystem, you can very easily play with ideas or start the basis of an application. Then once you've solved the business logic problems it's generally simple to move to a higher performance language.

[MrBuddyCasino]

I fully agree. Performance is not even that important, but for much of the Node.js/MongoDB hype cycle, thats what people often claimed was its biggest advantage; that "average" developers could now write servers that scale beyond what was thought to be practical.

But if that isn't true, then JS has to be measured against other languages on different merits, and e.g. Ruby and Lua are just as suitable for quick prototyping.

Anyway, these discussions usually end in language zealots downvoting each other and not much else, even on HN. Facebook still runs on PHP, so theres that.

[rezistik]

If you compare apples to apples I think the hype for NodeJS for most development is well deserved.

The fact that we are comparing static typed compiled languages like C and Java to NodeJS in order to find higher performance alternatives says a lot about it.

NodeJS isn't a replacement for those lower level languages, however when compared to other dynamic languages like PHP, Ruby, or Python it's suddenly far more competitive.

PHP is probably the main target in my opinion for Node. It's an incredibly popular language for nearly any web application use case.

http://blog.loadimpact.com/2013/02/01/node-js-vs-php-using-l...

The performance tends to favor Node over PHP. In fact, it favors NodeJS over a ton of languages in a lot of areas.

https://www.techempower.com/benchmarks/

These benchmarks really only place Java, Go and Lua above NodeJS in terms of performance.

Bundle in the ecosystem and developer productivity and it does earn the praise it received.

At the end of the day, the vast majority of developers will never need to optimize their applications past what NodeJS offers. Few of us will really deal with massive scaling issues on a day to day basis, nearly any modern language will handle the majority of applications. By the time performance is an issue it's probably time for a major refactor or rewrite building on the knowledge gained in the original version.