Also I thought something like PM2 (https://github.com/Unitech/pm2) or Forever (https://github.com/foreverjs/forever) was pretty much standard for production Node apps?
We use PM2 in production for web apps, long running processes (console apps with rethinkdb change feeds) and cron to spin up command line apps for data transformations, SaaS integrations, bots and more.
Most of us use VS Code now (I still use Vim)...so yes, having done enterprise work with a full blown IDE and tooling can be very helpful as the Node debugging and profiling experience is not great (but getting a ton better).
In the past we had a ton of C#/.net in production, then Ruby and now JS for the indefinite future. We build things that end up in production for 10 years or more, so having that talent pool to pull from in the future will be great.
* http://jdebp.eu./FGA/unix-daemon-design-mistakes-to-avoid.ht...
- Logging
- Metrics/Instrumentation/Tracing (memory usage, transactional performance monitoring, etc)
- Surviving exceptions
All of these are either very immature in Node or simply so far behind they may as well not exist. By nature of running in an application server, you do get a lot of benefits right off the bat for all of those, but even if you're running an executable jar instead of deploying to Tomcat stray exceptions will in almost no cases cause your application to simply die for all requests.
Also, say what you want about the verbose try/catch Exception model, but at least you can count on it. Am I getting an Error in this callback or is an exception going to get thrown? Oh, they leaked an exception when I was prepared to handle an Error and now my entire server is down. Does your process automatically restart? Not likely unless you spent a lot of time hand crafting your service to be daemonized, which is generally FAR beyond the scope of most developers I've met in any language (which also upsets me).