Re:First "official" NodeJS build on Windows
by MatthewPhillips on Wednesday July 20, 2011 @10:03AM
(#2785547)
V8 is open source, so it's compiled into Node. But I don't even compile open-source libraries into my windows assemblies. That seems like an incredible waste of time for little benefit.
Re:First "official" NodeJS build on Windows
by sjs on Wednesday July 20, 2011 @01:19PM
(#2786550)
The distribution & install story is better w/ a single statically linked exe (imo of course). Not to mention installing node for development and on servers. When everything is in one place it's just so easy.
I think the benefit is huge and don't see how it's a waste of time. Node is linked to specific V8 versions, it makes sense to include it.
Re:First "official" NodeJS build on Windows
by christkv on Wednesday July 20, 2011 @06:55AM
(#2784971)
Yeah there will be plenty off issues using npm. The native npm packages will most likely break. Npm has support for binary builds but I'm not sure most packages will have a completely separate build process set up for windows.
In the case of the mongodb package I'm deprecating the c++ bson parser as the js parser is as fast or faster than the c++ bson parser (v8 crankshaft and fast arrays rock) and this "should" make it work out of the box on the windows node.js build (crossing fingers)
Re:First "official" NodeJS build on Windows
by rbanffy on Wednesday July 20, 2011 @07:06AM
(#2784992)
Unless you are deploying on Windows, why not run it under cygwin? You may end up with a lot of silly problems with file paths, case insensitivity and any other "impedance mismatch" between your development environment and whatever server the workload will run on.
I did a lot of Django development on Windows and Cygwin saved me a whole lot of pain.
Re:First "official" NodeJS build on Windows
by rbanffy on Wednesday July 20, 2011 @07:25AM
(#2785038)
My first corporate issued laptop wasn't beefy enough to run Linux under a VM. Besides, it's convenient to have everything under one file space (moving things to and from the VM tends to be a pain - and if you get your email on Windows, important files will be, more often than not - on the wrong side). Add to that the fact Cygwin gives Windows a bunch of nice tools, langauges and a decent shell and windowed console.
Re:First "official" NodeJS build on Windows
by jjm on Wednesday July 20, 2011 @12:54PM
(#2786434)
Just a note, I use Node across Linux, OSX, and Cygwin on windows. I have zero problems with a NPM lib of 40+ modules. Everything from connect to bcrypt.
Re:First "official" NodeJS build on Windows
by rbanffy on Wednesday July 20, 2011 @09:25AM
(#2785368)
I have abandoned Windows again a couple years back, but, from my experience, most stuff that compiles cleanly under Linux, compiles cleanly under Cygwin. Do you have the required libraries? What did configure say? Can you try an older version (one known to work) to see if it compiles?
Re:First "official" NodeJS build on Windows
by wildmXranat on Wednesday July 20, 2011 @08:34AM
(#2785168)
Just throwing it out there, but what is the real reason behind making it windows friendly? Do developers want it or is it done with intentions to make it more appealing for corporate absorption?
With IO Completion Ports, the Windows kernel lends itself more to async server programming than Unix threads, Microsoft has committed to Joyent's port and with many developers working with Windows on their development boxes, even if they later deploy to a Linux environment, a windows port just makes sense.
Re:First "official" NodeJS build on Windows
by bmj on Wednesday July 20, 2011 @10:03AM
(#2785544)
I work at a Windows shop, and this comes at a good time for us, as node would scratch an itch, but prior to the Windows release, would have required additional infrastructure to use.
Re:First "official" NodeJS build on Windows
by noonat on Wednesday July 20, 2011 @09:26AM
(#2785372)
There are definitely use cases. My last employer worked on browser based gaming, and we were forced onto Windows because most of the games we needed to support and work with only ran on Windows. I had a really hard tine getting any significant adoption of Node because running it on Windows was difficult.
Re:First "official" NodeJS build on Windows
by forgotAgain on Wednesday July 20, 2011 @12:29PM
(#2786305)
Millions more developers can now play with it at work. Granted they could have been using a VM up to now but for many their machine can't handle a Java based IDE (Eclipse, Netbeans) within a VM.
Re:First "official" NodeJS build on Windows
by rbanffy on Wednesday July 20, 2011 @01:10PM
(#2786508)
Millions of developers have been able to play with it since the first release - Node likely ran under Cygwin just fine from the start.
And you don't need VMs to run Java-based IDEs on Windows - there is a native JDK you can download from Oracle and Windows runs Eclipse and Netbeans acceptably.
Re:First "official" NodeJS build on Windows
by MostAwesomeDude on Wednesday July 20, 2011 @12:58PM
(#2786456)
The reason Twisted is available on Win32 is because (a) there are developers willing to test and maintain the OS-specific support for Win32, and (b) some people deploy apps which use Twisted as their general networking stack. (Deluge is one popular example of a Twisted-powered GUI app.)
I bet the former is the big reason; I don't think people write full user apps with GUIs in Node very often.
Microsoft has the Chakra engine but as far as I know it was running inside IE only.
I think the benefit is huge and don't see how it's a waste of time. Node is linked to specific V8 versions, it makes sense to include it.
In the case of the mongodb package I'm deprecating the c++ bson parser as the js parser is as fast or faster than the c++ bson parser (v8 crankshaft and fast arrays rock) and this "should" make it work out of the box on the windows node.js build (crossing fingers)
http://blog.nodejs.org/2011/06/23/porting-node-to-windows-wi...
I did a lot of Django development on Windows and Cygwin saved me a whole lot of pain.
(That goes out the window if you are talking about performance testing of course.)
------
src/uv-cygwin.c:33: error: ‘CLOCK_MONOTONIC’ undeclared (first use in this function)
src/uv-cygwin.c:33: error: (Each undeclared identifier is reported only once
src/uv-cygwin.c:33: error: for each function it appears in.)
make[1]: * [src/uv-platform.o] Error 1
https://github.com/joyent/libuv/issues/112 for details.
With IO Completion Ports, the Windows kernel lends itself more to async server programming than Unix threads, Microsoft has committed to Joyent's port and with many developers working with Windows on their development boxes, even if they later deploy to a Linux environment, a windows port just makes sense.
Didn't we learn these lessons from the early days of Java when it was "write once, debug everywhere"?
And you don't need VMs to run Java-based IDEs on Windows - there is a native JDK you can download from Oracle and Windows runs Eclipse and Netbeans acceptably.
I bet the former is the big reason; I don't think people write full user apps with GUIs in Node very often.