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Comment by bshimmin | Hacker News Reader

Node.js is the rare example of a Linux-centric tool with great cross-platform support.

Apart from the problems with Windows, npm, and path lengths.

There are hiccups, but as a general statement I stand by it.

"Node is pretty impressive on Windows. You get the feeling that JavaScript (as well as HTML and CSS) are a first class citizen in the Operating System. I already have a list of dozens of Native Windows Apps I want to build using Node."

http://daverupert.com/2015/08/developing-on-windows/

(good contrast with other experiences from a polyglot)

"Node is quite awesome on Windows to be honest."

https://medium.com/@vernonk/surface-pro-4-the-ipad-i-always-...

It was an npm issue, fixed in npm 3.

http://www.felixrieseberg.com/npm-v3-is-out-and-its-a-really...

I may be somewhat biased because my primary platform is Windows, but IMHO 260 bytes is plenty for a full path. I've personally never run into that limit with what I do, but I'm aware that there are some programming languages and environments which even encourage very deep nesting (often with directories that contain nothing more than another one), making it much harder to navigate the resulting structure. It's good to see the Node.js people recognise this situation and go back to flatter hierarchies, even if it was Windows' path length limitations that motivated it.

http://blog.codinghorror.com/filesystem-paths-how-long-is-to...

The new babel 6 stuff was the first time I had hit the limitation, but their names are extraordinarily long.

The annoying thing is that the limitation only exists in some APIs. So you can create paths that are to long, but then most software can't deal with them, which is worse than not allowing long paths at all.

There are a lot of problems, actually. I don't think Node.js has bad cross-platform support but calling it "great" is definitely a stretch. Node's APIs are very low-level and unix-centric and the result is it is very easy to make a library that doesn't work well on Windows because it assumes unix-style paths, for example.

Or try using child_process.spawn without resorting to a 3rd party module or adding platform specific code yourself. Yeesh.

Path lengths is a windows issue not a node one. The same issue exists for C# or any windows language. BTW this is fixed with the latest npm!

Btw, that was fixed in node 5.0 with npm 3.

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