Hacker News Reader

Comment by monocasa | Hacker News Reader

Defaulting to browser based APIs when they exist (like a global 'window' element to access the DOM), rather than reinventing the wheel the way Node did. Although to be fair a lot of Node APIs predate their browser equivalents, and in a lot of ways the browser contains a 2.0 version of a lot of Node APIs.

View on HN

I can't think of a single case of Node reinventing the wheel with their APIs. Like you said, they were all created to fill gaps in browser JS implementations. It's obviously going to be hard to reconcile the two as browsers themselves increase their API surface, but then Deno is going to run into the same problem eventually.

I think that depends on how much deno commits to following the web APIs with each release.

Actually, nodejs has really done a lot of catching up with deno in this regard. It just has to support both the “legacy” way and the “forward looking” way where deno does not.

Node introduced the "global" object instead of using the existing "window" object the pre-existed in all browsers.

At least whe have "globalThis" now.

node actually invented a lot of wheels. node was first with promises (a couple major iterations!), streams, uhh I dunno what else. file access (we're just getting that now in the browser after some old ill supported early attempts). modules.

the web reinvented many of these wheels.

Node didn’t introduce the Promise API. Although it definitely instigated it. Node, with its async IO model, was just littered with callbacks. There were a zillion different approaches to async APIs that could ease that. Promises were, well, the most promising. But years of iteration and competing standards came and went before Node adopted them as the preferred API. And they did so right along with browser vendors and web standardization bodies.

I was referring to node <0.1.30[1] which did have promises for a while. largely from jQuery deferred, which were ungood in a couple ways I don't remember. but also remarkably similar.

I still largely think kris kowal building the "Q" promise library is what made promises interesting, what surfaced the idea that we might want to first-class our completeablea/futures. I know kris had some specific inspirations but I forget what.

pains me somewhat to this day that promises ultimately became somewhat un-value like, that handlers don't get to see what it was resolving. all the chain/spawn discussion, the functional promise folk: they got rolled by those insisting we had to target only the lowest rings of the developership, and that allowing more potent systems was unacceptable. wish I could find those es-discusa threads, for the powerful sorrow of the afteath, what we are stuck with, in it's so lites form, haunts me. especially as we double back a decade latter & invent controllers & signals toanage our promises. which we would have had for free.

way off topic now. forgive me my late night ramblings.

[1] https://github.com/nodejs/node-v0.x-archive/blob/v0.1.30/Cha...

This. I started tinkering with node shortly after I heard Ryan introduce it at JSConf EU, and it was a very different world, not much for Node to draw from on the browser side, no modules, no promises, not even TypedArrays IIRC.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com