Node.js 0.2.0 released

Post by fortes » Fri, Aug 20, 2010, 4:48 PM UTC

jdub wrote: post #21

kennu wrote: post #2

Finally, a (hopefully) frozen API for 0.2.x! I hope Ubuntu 10.10 Maverick gets a stable 0.2.x version of Node.

If you want to keep track of hot, fresh node-y goodness independently of the Ubuntu release cycle (as I do), then please enjoy my nodejs PPA builds. They're built for lucid, but run fine on maverick, and like everything else in that PPA, are used in production (thus I have an incentive to maintain them well). https://launchpad.net/~jdub/+archive/ppa Enjoy! (Note: I build a static version of node built against the int…

Post by Sephr » Fri, Aug 20, 2010, 5:52 PM UTC

mhansen wrote: post #7

morphir wrote: post #6

Earlier quoted context omitted.

let's see.. ascii is 4 bit. UTF8 is 8 bit. Is this really an issue on todays computers?

ASCII is 7-bit (encoded in 8 bits - the high bit is ignored) and UTF-8 takes 8 bits for most characters, but can take 16+ bits for some characters. Node is built for massive scalability on applications that (mostly) pass text from one source to another. Thus, having to convert the encoding of every string that passes through node can be a bottlenck. Felixge has a good writeup of this: http://debuggable.com/posts/stre…

Post by saikat » Fri, Aug 20, 2010, 8:59 PM UTC

pornel wrote: post #10

simonw wrote: post #5

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I got the impression that was a performance trade-off. UTF-8 decoding/encoding isn't free.

I know it's a trade-off, but IMHO it's a very poor one. That's premature optimisation. API is forever. This decision sacrificed easy internationalisation and correctness of data for minor performance benefit in current implementation. It's a big deal, because node.js isn't merely encoding-ignorant (like PHP), it actually removes higher bits. If you forget to specify encoding somewhere, your text will be malformed.