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Comment by exdsq | Hacker News Reader

I really want to know the answer to this question, seems a hell of a risk to move to JS prior to Node (for me it’s still a risk even after node because JS!).

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In the early 2000s it was recognized that the C/C++ code-build-run-debug development feedback loop was taking too long for efficient application development. 10-30 minutes to try out changes. It would have been risky not to try something new.

JavaScript revolutionized this, bringing the developer feedback loop time back down to a few seconds. Andrew Paprocki's 2011 JSConf talk demonstrates this. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ODgs0eWAIKc

The main competing technology at the time was Lua which would probably have been a fine alternative. JS won. Four years later Node was released which took server-side JS to a mainstream audience and helped validate the choice. Ten years later saw the ES6 renaissance and the rise of JS as a credible language for application development. Now TypeScript takes it to the next level, enabling large robust systems to be efficiently built using JS.

I'm pleased we bet on JS.

> The main competing technology at the time was Lua

The main competing technology for what exactly? I could easily think of 10 other server side choices off the top of my head from the 2005 time frame; like Java or C# to name a couple. Something is missing here.

Interpreted languages with no compile time it seems.

It wasn't an option back then, but now, if you wanted both a typed language and rapid code-build-run-debug for the server side, you could go even faster and simpler (snappy single-step compile to native executable) with Go. If you were starting now, would that work even better for you, or would other benefits of server-side JS outweigh the more complex toolchain and deployment?

One benefit of working with JS is that it was an easy transition to providing both client-side and server-side JS within the same application/project. Go would work on the server, but integrating it into a native MSVC Windows app, yet alone Chromium, would be... not fun.

This seems to imply something about the client side of your strategy that I wasn't aware of (but maybe I should have realized) that probably matters: that your clients will (almost?) all be Windows machines running the new-MS-strategy MSVC native apps written (at least partly) in JS, where "JS" on Windows now (as in Node) means Chromium specifically.

In a situation where you get to build the client all the way to the hardware, you're like Apple. You can probably get more advantage than most by matching client and server more deeply than the usual talk-to-the-API level. In your case, it sounds as though it's Microsoft's TS-in-Chromium spanning both.

Yes to Chromium, not so much for anything specifically MS-related. Using Chromium as a low-level GDI replacement lets you leverage higher-level constructs and work in web-space to implement rendering, and TS nicely spans between client-side Chromium and server-side V8.

Note -- it doesn't need to be specifically Chromium or specifically Node. It just so happens that Node bet on V8 and Chromium is embeddable, so you can get even more leverage out of using the two together. (We actually also use TS with server-side Spidermonkey as well, so TS has definitely proven itself as a better way to interop at the tooling level across these different implementations.)

This all comes with a Titantic-iceberg-sized caveat, however. Keeping up with Chromium is difficult. Any embedder is not Google and embedded use cases are not the web. You can leverage all the collective work put into making the web work quickly, but you have to back it up with your own resources to leverage the source and make changes and contributions where necessary.[1] It's definitely a balancing act!

[1]: https://github.com/bloomberg/chromium.bb/branches/active

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