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Interview with Ryan Dahl, Creator of Node.js

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Re: Interview with Ryan Dahl, Creator of Node.js

#81

Post by ploxiln »

jondubois wrote: post #71
s_kilk wrote: post #2

> That said, I think Node is not the best system to build a massive server web. I would definitely use Go for that. And honestly, that's basically the reason why I left Node. It was the realization that: oh, actually, this is not the best server side system ever. Really interesting. I can imagine others would refuse to give up on the thing they'd worked so hard on. But Dahl has the self-awareness to just step back an…

He doesn't give any specific reason why he thinks that Go is better. I've used both Go and Node.js and I came to the opposite conclusion. I'm not a huge fan of Goroutines spawning threads in the background. I think that spawning threads and processes should be explicit because there is a big performance penalty when multiple threads have to share a CPU core because of context switching. With Node.js, you have more co…

Well the thing is, Goroutines are not threads, they're coroutines. The go runtime uses up to a real thread per cpu core, and all your goroutines are run on those (fewer) real threads. The runtime also manages a shared thread pool for blocking syscalls e.g. local disk access and some kinds of name resolution depending on OS. But starting 10 goroutines is much cheaper than spawning 10 threads.

Re: Interview with Ryan Dahl, Creator of Node.js

#82

Post by corford »

bit_logic wrote: post #49

Many are forgetting the initial reason node.js became popular. Consider the popular server-side landscape before node.js. It was dominated by Java, Python, etc. The primary way these ecosystems handle concurrency is OS-level threading. There was nothing else in the popular languages. Each language had some niche library that did non-blocking I/O (Twisted for Python, Netty for Java), but these all had a critical flaw,…

>because the threaded code blocks.

Python and Java threads don't block on I/O, only on CPU. Event loops (i.e. node) also block on CPU.

AFAIK, node's advantage over threads was just that it offered much higher concurrency for I/O constrained tasks for the same memory (and was easier to programme for people coming from the front-end world).

Re: Interview with Ryan Dahl, Creator of Node.js

#83

Post by sah2ed »

k__ wrote: post #58
nas wrote: post #47

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This was easily foreseeable when he started on Node.js. The Twisted framework for Python had existed for years (decades?) before Node.js was created. Anyone familiar with programming in that style knew of the issues with "callback hell". I was the primary instigator of generators for Python. Part of my motivation was to do something like CSP (e.g. call-with-current-continuation, call/cc) without having to redo the wh…

Somehow I never experienced callback hell. It always felt like every other code-nesting problem to me. I mean, nobody talks about conditional hell, everyone acknowledges that you should flatten out your conditionals.

Callback hell was real, especially if you worked on projects that decided to join the node.js bandwagon in its early days. Then promises happened.

https://twitter.com/winterbe_/status/541868081308790784

Re: Interview with Ryan Dahl, Creator of Node.js

#84

Post by dsacco »

vqc wrote: post #34
amoorthy wrote: post #13

Pretty cool how he took a very unusual career/personal route to become such an important figure in the programming world. Good reminder for a parent like me that getting your kids into a "top" school isn't a must to succeed.

I mean, he went to two "Top 50" schools studying math. Do you mean he didn't go to an Ivy League or a school traditionally known as a top CS school?

Personally, I don't particularly consider schools in the "top 50" to be "top schools." I would consider schools in the top 10, maybe 20 for a particular major to be the colloquial "top schools" in that major.

So for Math and CS, yes, this mostly means mort of the Ivies and 10 or so other schools, including MIT and Stanford.

In general I'm of the opinion that there is a lot of "top school" inflation in the United States. It's better to consider schools on a major by major basis, especially at the graduate level, where your advisor might be more important than the school.

The reason I restrict the top to the top 10 (and top 20 for leniency) is because the admission standards are vastly different the first 10, then the next 10, then the next 10 - 20, and at that point there isn't a significant difference in "attainability" anymore. I term it this way because I think the word "top" is only useful for signaling, not for real qualitative comparison.

As a specific example: NYU is listed as a top 30 school for computer science, but while it's a good program, it seems odd to list it as a "top CS school" - is it really that much better than the next 10 or so, or is the term just diluted? Likewise, NYU is in the top 10 for mathematics, which actually seems sane from my perspective.

And in the top 25 schools for CS is Rice University - you need a new word to call the group that MIT, NYU and Rice are in, because "top" is no longer all that meaningful.

Re: Interview with Ryan Dahl, Creator of Node.js

#85

Post by watwut »

_nalply wrote: post #23

A serious problem with Node was the callback pyramid of doom. This means deeply nested callbacks such that the indentation wanders steeply to the right. When you do loops or have exceptions programming got very confusing. In effect you have to do a continuation passing transform. It's not difficult but the results are utterly unreadable. For example a simple for loop could be transformed into recursive function becau…

When your code wanders steeply to the right, then it is time to create named functions, variables or otherwise flatten it. Just like when the code nests too much for any other reason.

But I agree that js attracted "Real programmers don't use Pascal" kind of programmers at first. Pascal style programmers perceived js as pure hell and treated it as abomination. Through, I am not sure whether they were swayed or rather moved elsewhere in disgust.

Re: Interview with Ryan Dahl, Creator of Node.js

#87

Post by tmp124567 »

sreque wrote: post #79
bit_logic wrote: post #49

Many are forgetting the initial reason node.js became popular. Consider the popular server-side landscape before node.js. It was dominated by Java, Python, etc. The primary way these ecosystems handle concurrency is OS-level threading. There was nothing else in the popular languages. Each language had some niche library that did non-blocking I/O (Twisted for Python, Netty for Java), but these all had a critical flaw,…

Node.js brings callback hell to the serverside world of threads and we're supposed to be grateful? It's like you don't know the history of computing. Callback-based code was the original programming model in UNIX dating back decades! Threaded code came about because it's far easier to write it than callback-based code. The ONLY reason to do callback-based code is for performance reasons: for network-IO-heavy apps the…

You don't know what you are talking about. Code some simple server on c using epoll I think you could learn a lot from that. And JS has async await now, so no callbacks.

Re: Interview with Ryan Dahl, Creator of Node.js

#88

Post by WA »

sreque wrote: post #79
bit_logic wrote: post #49

Many are forgetting the initial reason node.js became popular. Consider the popular server-side landscape before node.js. It was dominated by Java, Python, etc. The primary way these ecosystems handle concurrency is OS-level threading. There was nothing else in the popular languages. Each language had some niche library that did non-blocking I/O (Twisted for Python, Netty for Java), but these all had a critical flaw,…

Node.js brings callback hell to the serverside world of threads and we're supposed to be grateful? It's like you don't know the history of computing. Callback-based code was the original programming model in UNIX dating back decades! Threaded code came about because it's far easier to write it than callback-based code. The ONLY reason to do callback-based code is for performance reasons: for network-IO-heavy apps the…

So if I don't like Java and C, what's your suggestion I should use instead to get the best of both worlds and not the worst?

Re: Interview with Ryan Dahl, Creator of Node.js

#89

Post by stouset »

cdelsolar wrote: post #73
nulagrithom wrote: post #68

Earlier quoted context omitted.

On that note, coming back from node.js has been a really frustrating experience for me. I want to scream every time somebody suggests threading as a solution to non-blocking database calls and HTTP requests. It's made me painfully aware of how often parallelism is suggested in place concurrency. C# in particular does a great job at conflating concurrency and parallelism. Both fall under the same Task namespace and it…

but why? Go's model is perfect. They're not real threads, it's basically very similar to Node, except that you can write code without a mess of callbacks and it's easier to reason about...

Go's model doesn't even statically prevent data races (as Rust's does). You might think Go's model is good, but it's a far cry from perfect.

Although I'll be happy to point out why Go's model isn't even good. Go's lack of ability to perform meaningful abstraction combined with the low level of its concurrency primitives means you end up having to copy/paste and slightly tweak dozens of lines of flow-control logic every time you use them.

This[1] is an excellent critique of Go's concurrency model.

[1]: https://gist.github.com/kachayev/21e7fe149bc5ae0bd878#so-wha...

Re: Interview with Ryan Dahl, Creator of Node.js

#90

Post by cmiles74 »

sporkland wrote: post #72
cmiles74 wrote: post #61

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I think the only new thing that node.js brought to the table was a nice way to run Javascript on the server. Node.js doesn't use threads, but as you said, their event-driven non-blocking I/O model wasn't new (Python had Twisted and Java had Netty). In addition, Java has had non-blocking I/O (in the form of the nio) packages for quite some time. In my opinion, Node.js became popular because people wanted to run Javasc…

I remember distinctly at the time that the fact that there was excitement around node.js because it was built from the ground up to use evented IO exclusively. All the libraries, the core runtime etc. People in other languages (C) were for sure doing it, but not in the holistic way node was. As opposed to java and python where you needed to avoid using the library calls that were blocking.

Fair enough, I agree that Node.js uses the evented model (AFAIK) almost exclusively. Still, the evented model is not unique to Node.js nor did they invent it. In my opinion, it was the dedication of Javascript developers and their reluctance to use another language that popularized this model: they had no choice.
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