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JavaScript is Eating the World

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Re: JavaScript is Eating the World

#31

Post by borisj »

fao_ wrote: post #17

The other day I managed to freeze my computer -- such that I did not even have access to the SysReq key, by stupidly running while (true) { var d = new Date; e.textContent = d.toLocaleString(); } I immediately realised my stupidity, and closed the tab. Shortly after, my mouse froze up, then my keyboard access, and eventually my entire access. Rather than just freezing Xorg as I had initially suspected, it froze my en…

Javascript is just the language. Its your runtime environment (browser) that is letting an unprivileged process consume resources like that without killing it.

Re: JavaScript is Eating the World

#32

Post by fao_ »

Sacho wrote: post #24
fao_ wrote: post #17

The other day I managed to freeze my computer -- such that I did not even have access to the SysReq key, by stupidly running while (true) { var d = new Date; e.textContent = d.toLocaleString(); } I immediately realised my stupidity, and closed the tab. Shortly after, my mouse froze up, then my keyboard access, and eventually my entire access. Rather than just freezing Xorg as I had initially suspected, it froze my en…

I tried your code snippet on my inferior Windows OS and inferior IE Edge browser. The tab stopped functioning. I opened a few other tabs and continued to work. Eventually IE showed a notice that the tab had stopped responding - I had the option to close the tab or recover the webpage. I clicked 'recover webpage', the page was refreshed and I could continue using it. Truly, Javascript is eating the world. Or perhaps t…

Do you deny that implementations are part of the language? If the Javascript specification left this out, what other implementation gotchyas exist for them to exploit?

Re: JavaScript is Eating the World

#33

Post by mschuetz »

sametmax wrote: post #16
voidhorse wrote: post #10

I think a few aspects of the language contribute to this: 1. It is relatively easy to comprehend and pick up and play around with. 2. With the advent of node.js, and later electron, it is incredibly relevant whether you're developing web apps, servers, or now, even desktop apps. 3. Some of the newer features, such as arrow functions actually make writing javascript a lot of fun! JS has come a long way. I do think the…

Take away the web platform, would you still use JS for anything ?

Yes. I've added V8 to my recent C++ project since JS is my favourite scripting language and it does wonders. JS has become a joy to use with ES6.

Re: JavaScript is Eating the World

#34

Post by sigzero »

sametmax wrote: post #18
hood_syntax wrote: post #4

The more time goes by the more I feel crazy for missing whatever would motivate people to use js for anything more than is strictly necessary. Single threaded server??? I mean come on man, I understand you don't need parallelism for a lot of use cases but even if that fits your situation why javascript? It can't be that hard using a different language. I refuse to believe that.

Exactly. We got cancer on one major organ, why spread it ?

Too late! cough Electron cough

Re: JavaScript is Eating the World

#35

Post by alayek »

johannes1234321 wrote: post #28
randiantech wrote: post #15

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Javascript as a language and ecosystem has evolved quite dramatically during the last years. Its not perfect though: it lacks features and ecosystem is still not in the level of maturity of other platforms, but is definitely going in the right direction. Regarding the single threaded server, its an architecture used before JS exists, and used by many other platforms/systems. Just to give you an example, Nginx workers…

In Nginx you're not doing computation, just passing IO thru between file system, external processes (i.e. PHP via fpm) and the network. If Nginx ever is CPU bound there's something bad happening. As I mentioned PHP: In PHP each worker is single threaded, too, but you can scale by having more workers in isolation.

You've hit the bull's eye! Yes, and you're also not supposed to do much computation in Node JS code.

Some addition, subtraction is fine. But Array iteration, JSON encoding-decoding and similar CPU bound tasks could block the event loop.

You can perform them asynchronously, or forward the request to some remote service that's better at doing these computations for you and return results (maybe some service written in Python or a database)

Re: JavaScript is Eating the World

#36

Post by sk5t »

fao_ wrote: post #32
Sacho wrote: post #24

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I tried your code snippet on my inferior Windows OS and inferior IE Edge browser. The tab stopped functioning. I opened a few other tabs and continued to work. Eventually IE showed a notice that the tab had stopped responding - I had the option to close the tab or recover the webpage. I clicked 'recover webpage', the page was refreshed and I could continue using it. Truly, Javascript is eating the world. Or perhaps t…

Do you deny that implementations are part of the language? If the Javascript specification left this out, what other implementation gotchyas exist for them to exploit?

Few but you likely consider the implementation part of the language.

Re: JavaScript is Eating the World

#37

Post by talmand »

jchw wrote: post #20

JS has the appeal that it's something a lot of people already have good amounts of experience with. And ES2015+ features add to the learning curve, but also give some much needed aid to existing problems; it's easy to pick up on async/await when you already know how promises work. Meanwhile, trying to find Go developers can be a challenge. And the learning curve is low, but there's plenty of low-level gotchas like de…

I'm beginning to think npm has joke potential like regex.

"I had a problem. I started using regex and now I have two problems."

Becomes...

"I had a problem. I ran npm install and now I have 21,735 problems."

Re: JavaScript is Eating the World

#38

Post by mschuetz »

hood_syntax wrote: post #4

The more time goes by the more I feel crazy for missing whatever would motivate people to use js for anything more than is strictly necessary. Single threaded server??? I mean come on man, I understand you don't need parallelism for a lot of use cases but even if that fits your situation why javascript? It can't be that hard using a different language. I refuse to believe that.

With ES6, JS became a really nice scripting language. Personally, I'm glad to see more and more projects that use javascript outside of web browsers and I've also added V8 to my most recent C++ project. The only major drawback in my opinion is, that it's not statically typed.

Re: JavaScript is Eating the World

#39

Post by falcolas »

alayek wrote: post #21
hood_syntax wrote: post #4

The more time goes by the more I feel crazy for missing whatever would motivate people to use js for anything more than is strictly necessary. Single threaded server??? I mean come on man, I understand you don't need parallelism for a lot of use cases but even if that fits your situation why javascript? It can't be that hard using a different language. I refuse to believe that.

Node is single threaded, in the sense that your code runs in a single thread. Your code assigns microtasks, to be executed later. Basically, if you write in Node JS, there's no concept of a thread. The thread API is not visible or accessible to the developer. This forces you to think from the ground up about asynchronous operations that would take some time to complete - file opening, network requests etc., and have…

Using non-blocking IO is a very old trick. Even nginx does exactly this, and it's written in C. The ability to use non-blocking IO does not make a language unique in any real fashion.

Re: JavaScript is Eating the World

#40

Post by alayek »

lunchables wrote: post #14
hood_syntax wrote: post #4

The more time goes by the more I feel crazy for missing whatever would motivate people to use js for anything more than is strictly necessary. Single threaded server??? I mean come on man, I understand you don't need parallelism for a lot of use cases but even if that fits your situation why javascript? It can't be that hard using a different language. I refuse to believe that.

I just tell myself it's because the sales pitch is so appealing: learn, and use, one programming language on the front end and back end of your web site. I've never written anything on node.js, but that's the only argument that's ever given me pause.

You should try. I come from a traditional Java shop, and a year ago wouldn't have thought of doing anything serious with Node JS.

Today, I do front-end React stuff as well as back-end servers with Node JS. I have been happy with it so far.

With some type-system like Flow or TypeScript, you can manage huge projects in Node JS.

I happen to like the community, CLI tools written in Node, and the plethora of open source libraries built on top of Node.

This also has a downside. Your libraries can get outdated quite fast, you would have to keep up with new language syntaxes etc., and remember which syntax is supported by which version of Node etc.

But so far, I think Node is headed in the right direction.

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