Re:I loved jQuery, and still do (2019)
by throwaway_egbs on Tuesday June 29, 2021 @02:43PM
(#27680022)
Yeah, I get all that too. I think my problem was that I sort of misunderstood what Node is. I've always thought of it as a web server, not a language runtime. So to me it seemed like using Node to run command-line tools was akin to doing
python -m http.server my_cool_cli_thing
which is, of course, a bananas way to do things. But now that I've dug into it a little more I see that this is a misapprehension that I formed based on Node's original use case as an event-driven web server.Thanks again.
JS is interpreted by the browser, but we compile locally so that the code produced implements workarounds for missing language features. The code produced is typically minified so that the payload sent to the browser is much smaller than it would otherwise be.
Node is analogous to Python, Ruby and PHP... they all can run webservices, power desktop apps and compile/build projects.