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First "official" NodeJS build on Windows

blog.nodejs.org

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Re: First "official" NodeJS build on Windows

#31

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?

Millions more developers can now play with it at work. Granted they could have been using a VM up to now but for many their machine can't handle a Java based IDE (Eclipse, Netbeans) within a VM.

Re: First "official" NodeJS build on Windows

#32
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

Just a note, I use Node across Linux, OSX, and Cygwin on windows. I have zero problems with a NPM lib of 40+ modules. Everything from connect to bcrypt.

Re: First "official" NodeJS build on Windows

#33

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?

The reason Twisted is available on Win32 is because (a) there are developers willing to test and maintain the OS-specific support for Win32, and (b) some people deploy apps which use Twisted as their general networking stack. (Deluge is one popular example of a Twisted-powered GUI app.)

I bet the former is the big reason; I don't think people write full user apps with GUIs in Node very often.

Re: First "official" NodeJS build on Windows

#34

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?

Millions more developers can now play with it at work. Granted they could have been using a VM up to now but for many their machine can't handle a Java based IDE (Eclipse, Netbeans) within a VM.

Millions of developers have been able to play with it since the first release - Node likely ran under Cygwin just fine from the start.

And you don't need VMs to run Java-based IDEs on Windows - there is a native JDK you can download from Oracle and Windows runs Eclipse and Netbeans acceptably.

Re: First "official" NodeJS build on Windows

#35

This is great. That means both Node.js and Coffeescript should now be natively available on Windows.

Please explain how native Coffeescript is available on Windows. I haven't been following that closely.

You can run a CoffeeScript repl using node.

Re: First "official" NodeJS build on Windows

#36

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

The distribution & install story is better w/ a single statically linked exe (imo of course). Not to mention installing node for development and on servers. When everything is in one place it's just so easy.

I think the benefit is huge and don't see how it's a waste of time. Node is linked to specific V8 versions, it makes sense to include it.

Re: First "official" NodeJS build on Windows

#37

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.

I shudder at the thought of writing Node apps in Windows only to later deploy them to a Linux environment. Sounds like a debugging nightmare.

Didn't we learn these lessons from the early days of Java when it was "write once, debug everywhere"?

Re: First "official" NodeJS build on Windows

#39
post #36

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

The distribution & install story is better w/ a single statically linked exe (imo of course). Not to mention installing node for development and on servers. When everything is in one place it's just so easy. I think the benefit is huge and don't see how it's a waste of time. Node is linked to specific V8 versions, it makes sense to include it.

Case in point: putty.exe

Re: First "official" NodeJS build on Windows

#40

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Thank you - that's great news. I'll keep an eye out for it.
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