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Re:Will Bun JavaScript Take Node's Crown by flohofwoe on Sunday August 14, 2022 @07:35AM (#32458416)
Fair point, but I sometimes wonder if there are even any web developers left who use Windows as their main platform. The one thing that has probably changed most in the last 15 years is that Windows isn't the center of the (coding) universe anymore. And (from what I can tell), Windows support with node.js isn't perfect either, otherwise tools like rimraf wouldn't be needed.
Re:Will Bun JavaScript Take Node's Crown by tyingq on Sunday August 14, 2022 @10:16AM (#32459422)
>if there are even any web developers left who use Windows as their main platform

There's quite a lot of developers at stodgy Fortune 500 non-tech companies that are sort of forced to use Windows for development. Either explicitly, or though poor enterprise support (vpn connectivity, local admin restrictions, difficult path to purchase a Mac, etc).

It's one reason things like Gitbash, WSL, Docker Desktop, etc, are very popular.

Re:Will Bun JavaScript Take Node's Crown by rr808 on Sunday August 14, 2022 @03:44PM (#32462276)
> There's quite a lot of developers at stodgy Fortune 500 non-tech companies

"Quite a lot"? There are more developers at Fortune 500 than FAANG for sure.

Re:Will Bun JavaScript Take Node's Crown by mr_toad on Sunday August 14, 2022 @07:37PM (#32464208)
> There's quite a lot of developers at stodgy Fortune 500 non-tech companies that are sort of forced to use Windows for development.

In that sort of company it’d take 2 years to get approval to install it anyway. If you submit the paperwork now there’ll probably be a windows port by the time it’s approved.

Re:Will Bun JavaScript Take Node's Crown by mastazi on Sunday August 14, 2022 @08:56AM (#32458863)
This might be the case in your specific social circle, but it doesn't seem to be generally true https://survey.stackoverflow.co/2022/#section-most-popular-t...
Re:Will Bun JavaScript Take Node's Crown by infamia on Sunday August 14, 2022 @02:16PM (#32461516)
Those numbers are all developers overall. In the Django developers survey (i.e. web only), Windows is just above 10%. The most used platform is Linux (42%), Mac 32%, Windows with WSL (i.e. Linux in a VM) 17%, and straight up Windows is a paltry 12%. In other web frameworks the numbers are likely worse, since Django has a pretty good Windows support.

https://medium.com/codex/jetbrains-django-developer-survey-r...

Re:Will Bun JavaScript Take Node's Crown by mastazi on Sunday August 14, 2022 @05:59PM (#32463381)
Actually, they are mostly web developers https://survey.stackoverflow.co/2022/#developer-roles-dev-ty...

In case you are seeking anecdotal evidence: does your company employ offshore devs? Try and ask them what do they use. Outside of the few countries where most people can afford Macs, things are different.

Re:Will Bun JavaScript Take Node's Crown by infamia on Sunday August 14, 2022 @09:54PM (#32465037)
I wonder if respondents were allowed to check more than one item on that list when answering the question? If so, there is likely a lot of double counting. Large, overarching surveys are quite difficult to create and interpret. The Django survey I quoted earlier was a worldwide survey for what it's worth.
Re:Will Bun JavaScript Take Node's Crown by mastazi on Sunday August 14, 2022 @10:26PM (#32465214)
> I wonder if respondents were allowed to check more than one item

yes, you are right, they definitely were allowed to check more than one item, we can see that the total sum of all options gives us a total of more than 100%, so that must have been the case.

But even then, it's hard to overlook the fact that the first three options in the list are related to web development, and with quite high percentages.

Re:Will Bun JavaScript Take Node's Crown by flohofwoe on Sunday August 14, 2022 @10:21AM (#32459475)
I'm coming out of the game development 'social circle' which is still a Windows fortress, but even there the wall is slowly cracking ;) In general I notice more and more that 'new peeps' are not automatically familiar with Windows, but instead started to tinker with programming on Linux.
Re:Will Bun JavaScript Take Node's Crown by M4v3R on Sunday August 14, 2022 @09:16AM (#32458997)
We are talking about web development, while the survey you linked is about all software developers. No one argues that Windows is king in software development world in general, but for web development I would argue Linux/Mac duo is way more popular.
Re:Will Bun JavaScript Take Node's Crown by mark_and_sweep on Sunday August 14, 2022 @10:16AM (#32459432)
Any data to support this claim? I'd argue the opposite: Especially in web dev, Windows is king since most people, including semi-professionals, do some sort of web dev.
Re:Will Bun JavaScript Take Node's Crown by mastazi on Sunday August 14, 2022 @06:12PM (#32463494)
> No one argues that Windows is king in software development world in general, but for web development

But given that the majority of developers are web developers[1], how can that be the case?

[1] including, unsurprisingly, the respondents to that survey https://survey.stackoverflow.co/2022/#developer-roles-dev-ty...

Re:Will Bun JavaScript Take Node's Crown by andrew_ on Sunday August 14, 2022 @09:48AM (#32459219)
Health care, logistics, law, finance, retail - there are a number of major industries that all still use Windows as primary. I have a good friend working in tech for Walmart, and another for a major hedge fund; both are Windows shops.

It's naive to assume that Windows isn't prolific. There's probably no good way to quantify numbers, but it's a major player still and likely always will be. WSL certainly helped keep that a reality.

Re:Will Bun JavaScript Take Node's Crown by paavohtl on Sunday August 14, 2022 @10:19AM (#32459445)
> And (from what I can tell), Windows support with node.js isn't perfect either, otherwise tools like rimraf wouldn't be needed.

I don't see how rimraf is related in any way. If you want to remove folders by calling a shell command (with full knowledge of all potential security and portability risks), your code is going to be platform dependent - it's not Node's responsibility to reimplement bash and/or GNU coreutils to make it magically work. Therefore, you need a Node re-implementation of the same functionality, either in the standard library or as a package.

And besides, rimraf has been unnecessary for a couple of years now, as Node's standard library includes a direct replacement: https://nodejs.org/docs/latest/api/fs.html#fsrmsyncpath-opti....

Re:Will Bun JavaScript Take Node's Crown by ledgerdev on Sunday August 14, 2022 @11:51AM (#32460245)
It might not seem like it but a vast majority of developers exist outside of hacker news sphere and have no doubt that windows is by far the most popular dev platform. WSL2 is making this a lot easier to use linux though.
Re:Will Bun JavaScript Take Node's Crown by Tade0 on Sunday August 14, 2022 @08:19AM (#32458641)
> Fair point, but I sometimes wonder if there are even any web developers left who use Windows as their main platform.

I kind of have to as of late, because due to corporate security policy I get around a minute of internet access from WSL and then the antivirus steps in and blocks it.

Re:Will Bun JavaScript Take Node's Crown by tyingq on Sunday August 14, 2022 @11:12AM (#32459914)
If that's because you're using wsl-vpnkit, you might want to see this commit:

https://github.com/sakai135/wsl-vpnkit/commit/94a85aaf4db365...

Re:Will Bun JavaScript Take Node's Crown by AlfeG on Sunday August 14, 2022 @12:30PM (#32460555)
I'm working in web Dev for a decade. Yet have to see at least single Dev using linux. Have seen several working on Mac, both designers to QA. Strictly speaking I'm a bit biased, cause work in . net stack. But still.
Re:Will Bun JavaScript Take Node's Crown by Huppie on Monday August 15, 2022 @01:52AM (#32466290)
Same here. Lots of .NET software around in my country, and most of it isn't on .NET Core yet (and having done it once, migrating away from .NET Framework isn't always easy... though it did get easier with .NET 5)
Re:Will Bun JavaScript Take Node's Crown by throwaway0asd on Sunday August 14, 2022 @08:15AM (#32458617)
If you are developing for the web what difference does the OS make? Web technologies work the same on any OS
Re:Will Bun JavaScript Take Node's Crown by flohofwoe on Sunday August 14, 2022 @10:15AM (#32459409)
Mainly subtle differences around command line tools and the file system. There are UNIX cmdline tools collections for Windows (like busybox) running in the vanilla cmd.exe or Powershell, but they don't quite fit in (for instance the way how string escaping and cmdline argument parsing works). You can use bash in a mingw 'UNIX emulator', but then you can just as well switch to WSL. And those little things propagate and amplify upward into toolchains and workflows.

It's possible to create command line tools that work across Windows and UNIX-oids, and I appreciate this, but it's a lot of additional work (even 'cross-platform' solutions like Python don't fully wrap this stuff, even though they do their best).

Re:Will Bun JavaScript Take Node's Crown by ripley12 on Sunday August 14, 2022 @07:20PM (#32464105)
> it's a lot of additional work

FWIW, I have been remarkably impressed with Rust for this. The stdlib and package ecosystem are unusually good at building abstractions that work across *nix and Windows, and so the average command line tool written in Rust usually has good Windows support.

Of course, the additional work hasn't really gone away - it's just been relegated to libraries unusually effectively :)

Re:Will Bun JavaScript Take Node's Crown by pmontra on Sunday August 14, 2022 @08:22AM (#32458654)
Sometimes the target OS for deployment matters. Obvious case I run into: a deploy broke because a developer using Windows didn't realize he had some MiXeD case file name with the wrong capital letter. The Linux OS on the production system noticed. Sometimes it's the availability of native modules. They tend to exist for Linux, because it's the target for deployment, and sometimes not for Windows.
Re:Will Bun JavaScript Take Node's Crown by davidmurdoch on Sunday August 14, 2022 @09:34AM (#32459111)
Basic CI tests should catch those cases.
Re:Will Bun JavaScript Take Node's Crown by pmontra on Sunday August 14, 2022 @02:59PM (#32461892)
The file names yes, modules are catched at development time. "We can't use PackageX because it doesn't exist for Windows and Joe won't be able to run the project anymore." A VM first and WSL2 now solved much of those problems, which leaves us at why bothering with Windows in this kind of business tough.
Re:Will Bun JavaScript Take Node's Crown by 542458 on Sunday August 14, 2022 @08:23AM (#32458657)
As a web dev, my choice of OS influences:

* What IDEs/editors I have access to

* What image editing tools I have access to

* How easy it is to get my server’s backend running on my local machineas a dev environment

The last one is most relevant to this conversation. If I’m working on a bun-based project, not being able to run a local dev copy on Windows easily is a nontrivial obstacle.

Re:Will Bun JavaScript Take Node's Crown by CapsAdmin on Sunday August 14, 2022 @08:44AM (#32458797)
While the final output should be the same, the development tools are not and that's really where all the subtle problems are.

One of the reason WSL exists is to solve this problem.

(assuming bun doesn't work on native windows but works under wsl)

Re:Will Bun JavaScript Take Node's Crown by vips7L on Monday August 15, 2022 @07:20AM (#32468270)
WSL has its own pain points. It’s not the catch all solution everyone claims it to be.
Re:Will Bun JavaScript Take Node's Crown by searchableguy on Sunday August 14, 2022 @10:40AM (#32459623)
You cannot install safari on Windows and Linux. If you want to support apple users, you need to get a mac.

Safari often has bugs and rendering issue which aren't present on Chromium or Firefox and need fallback.

Re:Will Bun JavaScript Take Node's Crown by password4321 on Wednesday August 24, 2022 @10:01PM (#32588506)
Not Safari, but WebKit: https://build.webkit.org/
Re:Will Bun JavaScript Take Node's Crown by tyingq on Sunday August 14, 2022 @10:20AM (#32459457)
Lots of little gotchas if you don't at least do a fair amount of testing on Windows, since that's what most of your end users (usually) will be on.

Things like "www-authenticate: Negotiate" in an SSO environment, people pasting rich text into web forms, handling environments with private certificate authorities, and so on.

Re:Will Bun JavaScript Take Node's Crown by Zardoz84 on Sunday August 14, 2022 @12:17PM (#32460438)
Windows it's painful slow to do anything.
Re:Will Bun JavaScript Take Node's Crown by sanitycheck on Sunday August 14, 2022 @09:42AM (#32459164)
I swapped between Windows and Linux (Mint/Pop) for a while because quite a lot of JS ecosystem things were problematic on Windows. WSL2 has solved most of those problems though.

I have bad luck with Macs, getting dev tools properly installed seems as hard as on Windows and everything falls apart a few times a year. The OS also seems to break itself and crawl to a halt sometimes (>1 minute to open settings). Linux distros were stable only if I can stayed on the happy path (single monitor, integrated graphics, don't try to sleep/hibernate) with close to default config. Windows can seemingly tolerate a lot more fiddling, at least since 7.

Re:Will Bun JavaScript Take Node's Crown by jpambrun on Sunday August 14, 2022 @12:26PM (#32460527)
I hate it but where I work WSL is not allowed and Docker requires continuously renewed exceptions.. InfoSec/IT says they can't see what we (or malware..) are doing within..
Re:Will Bun JavaScript Take Node's Crown by CryptoBanker on Monday August 15, 2022 @08:30AM (#32468822)
There are two developers on my team who have the option of using the latest Mac laptops but still insist on using Windows Think Pads
Re:Will Bun JavaScript Take Node's Crown by MBCook on Sunday August 14, 2022 @04:19PM (#32462568)
Yes. My entire company. And it’s not some little 5 person shop. They starred that way long ago and continue to this day.