Node Roundup
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Node.js Memory and GC Benchmarks
In Update on my Node.js Memory and GC Benchmark by Hannes Wallnöfer, the author discusses a conversation with Ryan Dahl about Node’s garbage collection performance in reference to RingoJS vs. Node.js: Runtime Values.
V8 uses a stop-the-world garbage collector, which technically means it will stop execution when performing garbage collection. The intention of V8’s design is to make an accurate and reliable garbage collector. The Design Elements document explains this in more detail.
What Wallnöfer appears to be saying is V8 isn’t perfectly tuned to the types of workloads we see in web applications. I think he makes a good point, but as I haven’t had any gripes about real world performance with Node it’s not something I’m too worried about right now.
Nutshell
Nutshell by Shahriar Haque, available at shahriarhaque / nutshell is a unix shell that runs on Node. The author’s example makes usage pretty clear:
ls -l | filter ""function(file) { return file.size < 2000; }""
In a sh style shell this would be written as follows:
ls -l | awk '{ if ($5 < 2000) { print $0 }}'
Haque’s idea is to try to make the shell more intuitive:
But if the second command is to do anything useful with this input, it has to go and parse it first. That’s what the awk command is doing. It is splitting the output of ls -l ,taking the 5th token of each line, performing the comparison, and printing the whole line if the test succeeds. This is where shell scripting is unproductive. It’s all about parsing output
Why node.js disappoints me
Why node.js disappoints me by Eric Florenzano is a brief critique of Node. I feel like the author might be a little irked by the constant stream of excited coverage (Hacker News loves those Node articles), but I still found the post interesting.
Yet one of Node’s advantages that you’ll hear repeated again and again by its proponents is that you can now code in One Language, and you won’t have to deal with the cognitive load of context switching between different languages.
I personally haven’t heard that sentiment repeated “again and again” — I became interested in Node because I respected the work that went into V8 and enjoy writing JavaScript. My JavaScript skills carry over intuitively and Node builds easily on all of my platforms, so I never really thought about it like that.
He also mentions that people have written libraries for Node that depend on Node, which effectively makes the Node environment a subset of JavaScript. There are libraries out there which are distributed with npm but work in a browser or another JavaScript interpreter. I’m not sure if the author is familiar with CommonJS, but the Node developers certainly don’t work in ignorance of it.
The article has some good comments by the usual suspects (Tim Caswell for example), which are generally not of the screaming-and-pitchfork-waving variety but more like a real conversation.
