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Gotchas from Two Years with Node

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11–20 of 125 posts

Re: Gotchas from Two Years with Node

#11
> Plenty of times, there will be an uncaught exception which–through no fault of your own–bubbles up and kills the whole process.

Really? I'm just a beginner with node.js, and I've been deeply frustrated by error handling, but if this is true, that's pretty damning. In just about every other web framework under the sun, you can go wild with exceptions and the worst you'll get is a 500 response for that request. (Yes, worse behavior is possible but very uncommon.)

Re: Gotchas from Two Years with Node

#13
post #10

The switch from Node to Go seems quite popular right now and it honestly makes me thing there's something wrong with the general perception of Node. We are currently in a world where we have a huge amount of traffic on almost every web app with just a discrete success, but we still make the mistake to pick a technology that seems "good enough", instead to pick a "great one" because looks slightly harder to manage/lea…

I think it makes sense, early on you're still "figuring it out" so a flexible framework thats easy to dive into is advantageous.

I don't see anything wrong with planning a rewrite X months into a product, since 90% of things don't make it to month X.

Re: Gotchas from Two Years with Node

#15
post #10

The switch from Node to Go seems quite popular right now and it honestly makes me thing there's something wrong with the general perception of Node. We are currently in a world where we have a huge amount of traffic on almost every web app with just a discrete success, but we still make the mistake to pick a technology that seems "good enough", instead to pick a "great one" because looks slightly harder to manage/lea…

I think it makes sense, early on you're still "figuring it out" so a flexible framework thats easy to dive into is advantageous. I don't see anything wrong with planning a rewrite X months into a product, since 90% of things don't make it to month X.

I don't see anything wrong here either, I kinda like the fact that as engineers/developers/coders we still have the opportunity to admit that an early stage decision doesn't fit our needs anymore and we can then change.

Re: Gotchas from Two Years with Node

#16
post #10

The switch from Node to Go seems quite popular right now and it honestly makes me thing there's something wrong with the general perception of Node. We are currently in a world where we have a huge amount of traffic on almost every web app with just a discrete success, but we still make the mistake to pick a technology that seems "good enough", instead to pick a "great one" because looks slightly harder to manage/lea…

You can make a bunch of money with something like Rails - if you're charging people directly, rather than low margin activities like advertising. See: Bingo Card Creator, Basecamp, and a bunch of other stuff. I'm a big Erlang fan, but objectively, Rails has a lot more to 1) get you up and running quickly and 2) iterate until you find some kind of product market fit.

Timely and relevant quote: https://twitter.com/patio11/status/587769019261829120

Re: Gotchas from Two Years with Node

#17
post #2

> At any given time there’s only a single running code block. > But here… there be dragons. That's one of the things Erlang solves pretty well. Sometimes I sort of envision it as that robot dog/mule thing that they keep kicking and it gets back up and keeps going. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=cNZPRsrwumQ if you have never seen it before.

Segment.io seems like the type of challenge that would be right in Erlang's sweet spot. The talk that Whatsapp gave on scaling Erlang is a good proof point that it's built to handle these systems quite well.

Re: Gotchas from Two Years with Node

#18

> Plenty of times, there will be an uncaught exception which–through no fault of your own–bubbles up and kills the whole process. Really? I'm just a beginner with node.js, and I've been deeply frustrated by error handling, but if this is true, that's pretty damning. In just about every other web framework under the sun, you can go wild with exceptions and the worst you'll get is a 500 response for that request. (Yes,…

Same happens with Java, C++, and many other languages.

There are web server packages on node that do catch errors that happen in synchronous code. For async, you can use promises, which take errors into consideration.

I'm not sure what happens on unhandled async errors on other languages, I guess in Java you could have a dangling request (happened to me before) or it could crash the app (also happened to me before). C++? I haven't really done much webserver work on that one so someone else may be able to write more about it.

Also obviously PHP, you just get a white page or actual full error stacks sent to the client, the joy! (edit: of course, if you don't handle it properly)

Re: Gotchas from Two Years with Node

#20

> Plenty of times, there will be an uncaught exception which–through no fault of your own–bubbles up and kills the whole process. Really? I'm just a beginner with node.js, and I've been deeply frustrated by error handling, but if this is true, that's pretty damning. In just about every other web framework under the sun, you can go wild with exceptions and the worst you'll get is a 500 response for that request. (Yes,…

Same happens with Java, C++, and many other languages. There are web server packages on node that do catch errors that happen in synchronous code. For async, you can use promises, which take errors into consideration. I'm not sure what happens on unhandled async errors on other languages, I guess in Java you could have a dangling request (happened to me before) or it could crash the app (also happened to me before).…

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