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First "official" NodeJS build on Windows

blog.nodejs.org

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Re: First "official" NodeJS build on Windows

#21

Just throwing it out there, but what is the real reason behind making it windows friendly? Do developers want it or is it done with intentions to make it more appealing for corporate absorption?

There are definitely use cases. My last employer worked on browser based gaming, and we were forced onto Windows because most of the games we needed to support and work with only ran on Windows. I had a really hard tine getting any significant adoption of Node because running it on Windows was difficult.

Re: First "official" NodeJS build on Windows

#22

Just throwing it out there, but what is the real reason behind making it windows friendly? Do developers want it or is it done with intentions to make it more appealing for corporate absorption?

http://nodejs.org/nodeconf.pdf

With IO Completion Ports, the Windows kernel lends itself more to async server programming than Unix threads, Microsoft has committed to Joyent's port and with many developers working with Windows on their development boxes, even if they later deploy to a Linux environment, a windows port just makes sense.

Re: First "official" NodeJS build on Windows

#23
post #7

Unless you are deploying on Windows, why not run it under cygwin? You may end up with a lot of silly problems with file paths, case insensitivity and any other "impedance mismatch" between your development environment and whatever server the workload will run on. I did a lot of Django development on Windows and Cygwin saved me a whole lot of pain.

I just tried to install node on cygwin and it failed with this error: ------ src/uv-cygwin.c:33: error: ‘CLOCK_MONOTONIC’ undeclared (first use in this function) src/uv-cygwin.c:33: error: (Each undeclared identifier is reported only once src/uv-cygwin.c:33: error: for each function it appears in.) make[1]: * [src/uv-platform.o] Error 1

I think you need cygwin 1.7.6 or newer to support CLOCK_MONOTONIC: http://www.cygwin.com/cygwin-ug-net/ov-new1.7.html

Re: First "official" NodeJS build on Windows

#24

Just throwing it out there, but what is the real reason behind making it windows friendly? Do developers want it or is it done with intentions to make it more appealing for corporate absorption?

I work at a Windows shop, and this comes at a good time for us, as node would scratch an itch, but prior to the Windows release, would have required additional infrastructure to use.

Re: First "official" NodeJS build on Windows

#25

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Why? If you use someone else's library there's going to be a dll associated. Node doesn't have any dependencies.

Does a javascript engine like V8 have to be installed separately to avoid dependency issues? Microsoft has the Chakra engine but as far as I know it was running inside IE only.

V8 is open source, so it's compiled into Node. But I don't even compile open-source libraries into my windows assemblies. That seems like an incredible waste of time for little benefit.

Re: First "official" NodeJS build on Windows

#27

Just throwing it out there, but what is the real reason behind making it windows friendly? Do developers want it or is it done with intentions to make it more appealing for corporate absorption?

Node.js looks interesting and I may take a look at it. I would never install a different operating system just to try it out though.

Re: First "official" NodeJS build on Windows

#30
post #7

Unless you are deploying on Windows, why not run it under cygwin? You may end up with a lot of silly problems with file paths, case insensitivity and any other "impedance mismatch" between your development environment and whatever server the workload will run on. I did a lot of Django development on Windows and Cygwin saved me a whole lot of pain.

I just tried to install node on cygwin and it failed with this error: ------ src/uv-cygwin.c:33: error: ‘CLOCK_MONOTONIC’ undeclared (first use in this function) src/uv-cygwin.c:33: error: (Each undeclared identifier is reported only once src/uv-cygwin.c:33: error: for each function it appears in.) make[1]: * [src/uv-platform.o] Error 1

It's been fixed in master. 0.5.2 comes out tomorrow (if all goes well) and will also contain the fix.

https://github.com/joyent/libuv/issues/112 for details.

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