Deno: JavaScript Runtime for V8 Written in Rust

Re:Deno: JavaScript Runtime for V8 Written in Rust by chrisco255 on Tuesday January 21, 2020 @04:06AM (#22105365)

Humans have a huge context switching penalty when switching between operating systems, written languages, and of course programming languages. Hell even switching browser tabs incurs a context switching cost. The more complex the interface the more the difficult the context switch is. The process and mindset for debugging Java and JavaScript are totally different. The tools used for each are different. Thinking about the data structures of Java vs. JavaScript alone, is a context switch. Onboarding new devs requires them to learn architectural patterns (as well as master two languages) that are totally different in most cases because JS code tends to be written much differently than Java as a result of Java's heavy focus on OOP. Nothing wrong with any of this and I'm not attacking Java by any means, we could easily have the same convo about C++ vs. Go or Python vs. Rust.

It's not about "sharing code" between front end and back end. Although you can share code and I have in several projects, what I mentioned above was sharing libraries. That's very common, for example, Moment.js, Lodash, and i18n utils. I also use Chrome debugger tools on both front end and back end. I have even shared architectural patterns for state management.

I agree Java dependencies are less error prone because they're bundled up as Java byte code and I get the appeal there.

I agree Python has a fantastic standard library and Node is spartan by comparison. That was always a trade-off that Node consciously made from the beginning though.

Didn't know that about the GC defaults.

[ Parent | on HN ]

Re:Deno: JavaScript Runtime for V8 Written in Rust by freeopinion on Tuesday January 21, 2020 @01:29PM (#22109848)

I don't see much trouble context switching between HTML, CSS, and JS on the frontend. I don't see much trouble switching between some other language on the backend and SQL, JSON, macro, etc.

Context switching is a real thing, and sometimes creates penalties. But sometimes it increases productivity. For me it is very helpful to switch into SQL mode when grabbing data from a store, then switching to Go/Python/JS/Rust/C++/Ruby/etc thinking for the business rules around that data.

Frontend JS and backend JS are not really the same language or environment. They are different in important ways. But they are so very similar that it can be easy to be in "frontend" thinking mode when working on the backend, or vice versa. And I have many many times seen that cause problems.

That's not to say that it is bad to use the same language in both places. I'm just pointing out that there are pluses to context switching as well as negatives.

[ Parent | on HN ]