After a year of using Node.js in production

Re:After a year of using Node.js in production by spion on Tuesday May 03, 2016 @01:37PM (#11622681)

I'm afraid that based on what you said, it only made it clearer that this wasn't an issue with the ecosystem but with that particular developer. I don't really see how you can extrapolate that this was the node ecosystem's fault, when you have a developer that is trying to implement SQL on top of NoSQL and pull in a gigabyte of dependencies for an embedded platform. If a C++ developer was trying to implement the app on top of MongoDB's source code, that says more about the developer then about C++ and its ecosystem.

I might concede that the node ecosystem does have a disproportionate number of people with this mindset though :)

By the way, cross-compilation is also an option, although I haven't personally tried it:

https://github.com/mapbox/node-sqlite3/issues/249

A plus would be that only native modules have to be compiled, and only once. After that its possible to set up downloading them as binary blobs.

You got me curious about the application, by the way. If you let me know what it does, it might be fun to try and implement a prototype in node (with sane dependencies and easy to deploy on a RPi)

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Re:After a year of using Node.js in production by Silhouette on Tuesday May 03, 2016 @02:25PM (#11623029)

Just to be clear in case I've given the wrong idea, my point here is not really to criticise Node in general. I'm just saying, with the benefit of hindsight of course, that it was not the ideal choice for that particular job. In particular, because of the hype around Node, I think the people making the decisions (including the developer who was working on it) honestly didn't expect that, and perhaps weren't sure how to proceed when the problems I mentioned started mounting up.

(Edit: That said, the difficulties with size, portability and dependency management in the Node ecosystem that were exposed by this particular project are more general flaws with that Node ecosystem and not specific to this particular developer.)

You got me curious about the application, by the way. If you let me know what it does, it might be fun to try and implement a prototype in node (with sane dependencies and easy to deploy on a RPi)

It really wasn't anything very complicated by database standards, just storing some settings in a central place. Those settings were a bit more complicated and inter-related in this case than you could conveniently store using something as simple as a plain text file, so a lightweight database was the next logical step. As mentioned before, it was the kind of thing where you could implement the basic infrastructure required within a few hours using more suitable tools.

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Re:After a year of using Node.js in production by spion on Tuesday May 03, 2016 @05:36PM (#11624433)

Okay. I've had vastly different experience with node on ARM. Much more reasonable dependencies size then what you report (by about 2 orders of magnitude) and excellent performance from the JIT. Combined with the ability to first write dynamic code then switch to static types, as well as the memory safety, its been a lot more pleasant than working with C.

So honestly, I really can't relate to most of what you said here :)

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Re:After a year of using Node.js in production by Silhouette on Tuesday May 03, 2016 @07:38PM (#11625100)

Please keep in mind that the Raspberry Pi was only an example. We're talking about embedded here, so there are all kinds of weird and wonderful CPUs and storage systems and I/O components being used in various devices that need to run the code I'm talking about. Certainly not all of them were ARM chips. I don't know which chips caused the big problems with porting Node, nor which specific packages, so it's entirely possible that whatever you've worked on was closer to the mainstream and supported just fine.

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