Why node? 2 reasons: async which C# has too, and coding in just one language. And no, writing backend JavaScript doesn't mean you're better.
If you get some better tooling for multi-language development, it will usually pay off a lot faster than choosing Node for your backend will.
That way lies surrender by default to the Google empire.
These days my main strategy is to have three TypeScript projects—frontend, backend, and common. I then whitelist imports in the common libraries.
> It's the same language, using the same JavaScript engine (v8 for chrome).
I find it completely unacceptable to assume that V8 is running in the browser. In general, I do all of my JS development work in Firefox or Safari, and this saves me a bunch of time checking portability later.
New features will have varying support between implementations in any language. You have to take these differences into account even if you're writing frontend-only code.
> I find it completely unacceptable to assume that V8 is running in the browser. In general, I do all of my JS development work in Firefox or Safari, and this saves me a bunch of time checking portability later.
The point is it can be the same javascript engine for frontend and backend. The difference between Node JS and Firefox JS is the same as between Chrome JS and Firefox JS.
For frontend, you use transpilers or polyfills to smooth over the differences between browsers. You then package these up, with rollup or webpack or whatever, and deliver to the client.
My experience is that once you add backend to your list of supported targets, you have to get quite a bit of new tooling in place. Backend code is generally not packaged before running, imports are done at runtime rather than build time, etc. There’s a whole pipeline between your source code and the JavaScript engine, and that pipeline has a different shape for backend and frontend, and typically uses completely different libraries to make it work.
> The point is it can be the same javascript engine for frontend and backend. The difference between Node JS and Firefox JS is the same as between Chrome JS and Firefox JS.
I don’t know what kind of point that is, because it doesn’t matter to me that sometimes the frontend and backend will happen to run on the same engine. I haven’t figured out a way to leverage that fact to give me any additional productivity.
For the projects I’ve worked on, it can end up taking me quite a bit of time figuring out how to make one piece of code work in both frontend and backend, even though I can trivially make it work in either environment as I please.
Maybe other people have already solved this, but I recently went through and made a bunch of PRs to fix a common issue I saw in other people’s codebases and it was super rare to see any code shared between frontend and backend.
You still have to identify which polyfills you need, add them in, test them, etc. Polyfills are also quite buggy especially for new features from my experience. Also, the fact that you're typically running your build, packaging, linting, testing etc. on Node for your frontend code, says a lot.
> My experience is that once you add backend to your list of supported targets, you have to get quite a bit of new tooling in place.
When is that really even a consideration though? When do you actually need to deploy your frontend app to Node? If you have common model code, or say, input validation/sanitation, business logic, etc - that can easily be identical for both browser and Node.
> Backend code is generally not packaged before running, imports are done at runtime rather than build time, etc.
That really depends on your setup. You can do imports at runtime or build time for both Node and browser. If you're transpiling the setup is pretty much identical.
> I don’t know what kind of point that is, because it doesn’t matter to me that sometimes the frontend and backend will happen to run on the same engine.
How do you run your unit tests, your static code analysis, your packaging and traspiling? Do you run it in the browser or in Node? There is no fundamental difference between JS of the same version in Node vs Browser. Any browser specific or Node specific libraries/features you use are generally not part of any stable JS spec.
> it was super rare to see any code shared between frontend and backend.
Well I'm assuming these are different applications, so that's expected. I don't know why you wouldn't share your model definitions and/or validation/sanitation code though. People do this even for backends/frontends written in different languages.
You just have to keep an eye on your client bundle size if these shares functions ref something like underscore, moment or something like that where you’re pulling in the entire thing for one function. I’m aware you can just pick pieces with {} and import, but not everyone is aware and often require the entire thing.
It only works if the paradigms your app uses are the same in the front and back. And I have nott seen a project where the KIND of problems that need solving (in the front vs back) were close enough for the same language to be a benefit.
I mean at the end of the day, I can build a house with JUST a screwdriver, but man, I'd rather use the right tool fot the specific job.
And at the end of the day, $LANG is a tool.
Ive not worked with c# much, but is that not as much of a problem with it? Like, is there more of a standardized way of doing things? Python is kinda like that i guess.
Some subset of that can be achieved with stuff like GraphQL or Swagger and what not though I haven’t given it a serious try since we’ve never run into hiccups yet with this system, reliant on a very simple library.
We also use the same package manager (NPM) on both ends and can therefore invoke scripts all over our codebase with the same syntax; and although react code and node code is quite different in structure, they all have the same idioms and async syntax and stuff, so the amount of retraining necessary to convert someone from backend to full stack isn’t very large due to the same environment, and keeping code style consistent across the project is also easy.
So I feel like there’s definitely stuff to profit off of with sharing a single language.