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I finally escaped Node

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Re: I finally escaped Node

#141

Post by dariusj18 »

conradfr wrote: post #96

I'm still astonished that someone was writing Javascript on the browser and found the experience so great that he thought "I also want to do it on the backend!". More seriously, I'll admit I'm not a competent Node dev but the worst part for me is how convoluted you have to write large parts of code that don't need to be asynchronous or non-blocking in the first place. I also never figured why sometimes Node just sile…

It's not that they loved writing Javascript on the frontend, it's that they can't write anything else on the front end. So why use two languages when one will do?

Re: I finally escaped Node

#142

Post by hajile »

chrisandchris wrote: post #109
bstar77 wrote: post #68

Earlier quoted context omitted.

- Lack of a good standard api: I don't understand this one. I've never had a problem with its documentation and the API always seemed fine to me, but I don't use C# or Go so maybe I'm missing out? - There's a tendency in the ecosystem to abandon projects rather soon: This can certainly happen, but it's important to choose libraries and frameworks carefully. My node servers (Express.js) are extremely light weight, so…

About lack of standard library: I don‘t personally work with node for the backend but typescript/javascript in the browser. And I think what is meant is something like LINQ in C# (all kinds of functions you can apply on enumerables/arrays), some basic DateTime library (how to add two dates in JS? How to get the diff of two dates in days or hours in JS? Both are 1 liners in C#) and maybe some more stuff for string mut…

There’s work on new JS standard called Temporal that’s a stage 3 proposal. People should be using its poly fill instead of other data libraries where possible.

https://github.com/tc39/proposal-temporal

JS standard libraries are forever. It pays to take a bit more time and get it right.

Re: I finally escaped Node

#143

Post by jfengel »

FlyingSnake wrote: post #60
cygned wrote: post #19

We went away from node as a backend technology for a bunch of reasons. Here's a list of the biggest pain points: - Lack of a good standard API; compared to environments like Java, C# or Go, node's standard library is significantly sparse. - The tendency for small libraries/frameworks leads to a very high number of third party code with all the problems attached; bigger attack surface, licensing challenges, it's econo…

I would upvote this comment a hundred times if I could. I had got a Node project in my previous gig and I hated it every minute. The team got immensely productive when we migrated it to Golang. In the times of RESTful APIs and µServices, is there really a need for node? JVM, C#, Elixir, Golang etc provide excellent development experience and are battle tested the way single-threaded Node just hasn't been.

The main advantage of Node is that you're already using Javascript on the client side, and this lets you share code. If you've got business logic that you want to use on both client and server, keeping them in synch between two different languages is a nightmare. It's pretty much the epitome of Repeating Yourself.

That said, it's kind of a narrow domain, where your server-side logic is simple enough that you can successfully write it in Node, but complex enough that there's code you can't afford to keep synched.

Re: I finally escaped Node

#144

Post by jfengel »

jimbokun wrote: post #123
haolez wrote: post #43

Earlier quoted context omitted.

How do you feel about the impact on developer productivity after migrating to Java + Spring Boot? I haven't used Java in a long while and every time that I try to come back to it, I get driven away by the difficulty and complexity to do simple things (thinking of annotations, dependency injection, complicated design patterns). It feels like an effort of one hour of Node or Python programming (or even Go) would take 1…

I maintain a Java Spring Boot service full time, and when something stops working or doesn't do what you expect, it can be a total nightmare to debug. There is so much misdirection, it can be incredibly difficult to figure out which code will be executed, in which order. I try to make things as explicit as possible, which can help in testing and debugging.

Inversion of control means you have no control.

Re: I finally escaped Node

#145

Post by hajile »

LargeWu wrote: post #122
conradfr wrote: post #96

I'm still astonished that someone was writing Javascript on the browser and found the experience so great that he thought "I also want to do it on the backend!". More seriously, I'll admit I'm not a competent Node dev but the worst part for me is how convoluted you have to write large parts of code that don't need to be asynchronous or non-blocking in the first place. I also never figured why sometimes Node just sile…

"More seriously, I'll admit I'm not a competent Node dev but the worst part for me is how convoluted you have to write large parts of code that don't need to be asynchronous or non-blocking in the first place. I also never figured why sometimes Node just silently ends without pointing my syntax error (and more importantly the line number)." This, so much. Even for moderately complex data workflows, 95% of the time wh…

Try writing evented code in Python or Ruby. It’s very hard because most libraries in those languages block all over the place. There just isn’t much run in the middle between these paradigms.

Any time you spin off a new thread or process, it’s going to eliminate that nice continuous call stack (though there has been some work on this). That’s not a JS issue but more an issue of async programming in general.

I’d love to see JS unify web workers with BEAM-style lightweight, managed actors since they aren’t incompatible. In the meantime, I’ll take the minor pain around async for the massive performance boost relative to other scripting languages.

Re: I finally escaped Node

#146

Post by hajile »

martinald wrote: post #39
watermelon0 wrote: post #3

I agree with some points author is making, but overall I wouldn't put them either on Node.js runtime, or Node.js ecosystem. a) Erratic max latency IME Node.js performs well if you are not pushing its limits. If you have a service receiving 25k+ requests per second, you should better benchmark it, regardless of the language. Horizontal scaling should be configured based on the results of the benchmark. b) Cognitive ov…

(This may have changed since I used it in anger last). NodeJS does not handle multicore servers well, and I imagine many people don't realise this and have a huge amount of unused CPU capacity. You need to run multiple nodejs processes (one for each core really) to get the most of it. But this then requires load balancing even on a single machine, so a lot of people don't do it. There are other solutions but often re…

Node has worker threads and shared memory buffers to share data between them.

Re: I finally escaped Node

#147

Post by searchableguy »

marshmellman wrote: post #6
dnautics wrote: post #4

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Languages without strong typing, like Elixir. Have you ever actually worked with elixir? In practice the (strong) dynamic typing of elixir is not a problem. I have not written a type error that has made it to prod in tens of thousands of lines of code. The last type error I made only showed up extremely rarely (once a week or so) and it didn't matter because the supervisory tree restarted the process that threw it.…

How is refactoring? I was considering moving from Node to Elixir, but now that I’m using TypeScript it does feel like I would be giving something up. It’s a breeze to make broad changes knowing the compiler will prevent me from missing a code path, etc.

You can use @typespec and @behavior to type parts of elixir.

https://elixir-lang.org/getting-started/typespecs-and-behavi...

Re: I finally escaped Node

#148

Post by wtetzner »

napsterbr wrote: post #88
striking wrote: post #82

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Testing with the database isn't particularly efficient. If you have enough tests, it becomes worth it to mock whatever would touch the database just so the tests pass in a reasonable amount of time.

> Testing with the database isn't particularly efficient. Anecdata, but my experience with Ecto sandbox + thousands of tests says otherwise. Mocking would be faster? Probably. But IMO not worth the effort, given it's already fast enough. To be fair, I have worked with Elixir codebases that generated humongous amount of data per-test, only to test a fraction of this data. This kind of test was slow, but it would be mu…

> But IMO not worth the effort, given it's already fast enough.

Not only that, but if you're testing with the database, you get to test your queries. That seems worth it being a bit slower.

Re: I finally escaped Node

#149

Post by martinald »

hajile wrote: post #146
martinald wrote: post #39

Earlier quoted context omitted.

(This may have changed since I used it in anger last). NodeJS does not handle multicore servers well, and I imagine many people don't realise this and have a huge amount of unused CPU capacity. You need to run multiple nodejs processes (one for each core really) to get the most of it. But this then requires load balancing even on a single machine, so a lot of people don't do it. There are other solutions but often re…

Node has worker threads and shared memory buffers to share data between them.

Do you have a link to the shared memory buffers? I can't find much about them. I've found some stuff about worker threads but can only pass strings.

Re: I finally escaped Node

#150

Post by 13rac1 »

genericstorage3 wrote: post #74
cygned wrote: post #19

We went away from node as a backend technology for a bunch of reasons. Here's a list of the biggest pain points: - Lack of a good standard API; compared to environments like Java, C# or Go, node's standard library is significantly sparse. - The tendency for small libraries/frameworks leads to a very high number of third party code with all the problems attached; bigger attack surface, licensing challenges, it's econo…

How do you share code between client and server? That's key

Share code between client and server using WebAssembly[1]. The Twitch video player is written in C++ via WASM[2]. C# can be "full stack" with Blazor[3]. Rust can be "full stack" with Yew[4]. Similar support exists for other languages including Go[5] and even the TypeScript-syntax AssemblyScript[6].

[1]: https://medium.com/wasm/webassembly-on-the-server-side-c584f... [2]: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=16835769 [3]: https://dotnet.microsoft.com/apps/aspnet/web-apps/blazor [4]: https://github.com/yewstack/yew [5]: https://github.com/hexops/vecty [6]: https://www.assemblyscript.org/

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