I can't really speak for twitter but we use node.js happily at Soundkeep. It works greate for our use case of streaming audio processing. It has come a long way since it started. Obviously it isn't as mature at Ruby/RoR or Python/Django but not nearly as bloated either. The comparison is weak though since it isn't a framework but more of an environment. A lot of people like to think of it in comparison to the big frameworks though. Node.js is more about smaller libs and modules than any single framework.
Ask HN: Is NodeJS stable enough to build the next Twitter?
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Re: Ask HN: Is NodeJS stable enough to build the next Twitter?
#12Twitter was built on Rails when Rails was much younger and less stable. I think you'll be fine with Node.
Re: Ask HN: Is NodeJS stable enough to build the next Twitter?
#13AirBNB does a lot of node.
Much of their stack is node.
Like others have said, 'too many users' is a first world problem that many would like to have.
Re: Ask HN: Is NodeJS stable enough to build the next Twitter?
#14Whatever you write now would never scale to be Twitter as it is now, there's no point even considering that as you aren't thinking on anything like that scale conceptually. I doubt most developers can. But then writing something that could scale to Twitter scale when you don't have a business or users or revenue would be pointless. Specifically to answer you question, no. Node could work as a thin publishing veneer o…
Node could work as a thin publishing veneer on a much larger stack but you just don't get what you need from Node.js end-to-end.
Re: Ask HN: Is NodeJS stable enough to build the next Twitter?
#15Yes. Voxer uses it at scale, they are doing realtime voice over HTTP
Also lots of other important companies use it behind the scenes.
Re: Ask HN: Is NodeJS stable enough to build the next Twitter?
#16We've built the control plane to Rackspace Cloud Monitoring in Node.js, and overall the experience has been positive.
A few things to look out for:
1. Error handling. In node you can't just wrap your code in a try/catch. And even if you register a listener for uncaught exceptions, you almost certainly have state shared between requests (for example, a database connection pool), which makes trying to handle such exceptions risky. To use node effectively, you need to be very careful to prevent exceptions from being thrown in unexpected locations.
2. Code rot. It is a lot less obvious what is idiomatic in Javascript as compared to Python, etc. Its easy to end up with a wide range of styles and patterns, which make maintenance difficult.
3. Missed or double callbacks. These are interesting mostly because they are not something you would see in synchronous code, and they can be quite difficult to troubleshoot (especially double callbacks).
Mitigating these issues is as much a cultural challenge as it is technical. Lint everything, review code aggressively, and don't merge code that doesn't have tests. Choose libraries carefully (the ecosystem has come a _long_ way in the last few years).
All of that being said, these are things you should be doing anyway. Develop a good tech culture, but get your product out and grow your user base. If you become the next Twitter you'll have the resources to undo any mistakes you make now.
Re: Ask HN: Is NodeJS stable enough to build the next Twitter?
#17I run http://jsonip.com. It's a single node process running on a VPS. It supports more than 10 million requests a day and barely stresses the system. Granted that its a relatively simple app, but it's raw node.js. I can easily scale it in a few simple ways like adding a caching layer and/or load balance a few extra servers. Haven't needed to yet.
Re: Ask HN: Is NodeJS stable enough to build the next Twitter?
#18This sounds like a Maserati problem http://www.urbandictionary.com/define.php?term=Maserati%20Pr.... To answer your question though, many big companies now use Node.js and it is stable enough.
Re: Ask HN: Is NodeJS stable enough to build the next Twitter?
#19We've built the control plane to Rackspace Cloud Monitoring in Node.js, and overall the experience has been positive. A few things to look out for: 1. Error handling. In node you can't just wrap your code in a try/catch. And even if you register a listener for uncaught exceptions, you almost certainly have state shared between requests (for example, a database connection pool), which makes trying to handle such excep…
Have you tried a Promises implementation like deferred https://github.com/medikoo/deferred to manage callback spaghetti?
Re: Ask HN: Is NodeJS stable enough to build the next Twitter?
#20We've built the control plane to Rackspace Cloud Monitoring in Node.js, and overall the experience has been positive. A few things to look out for: 1. Error handling. In node you can't just wrap your code in a try/catch. And even if you register a listener for uncaught exceptions, you almost certainly have state shared between requests (for example, a database connection pool), which makes trying to handle such excep…
Thanks! In fact, I knew that Rackspace uses Node and thus am incredibly happy that I got an answer from you folks.
Any particular architecture you guys followed in building your app?
I'm doing as many things right as possible, but I would rather take as much advice as I can get than being sorry later. Node, like Python, isn't really forgiving.