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I've had this question myself - how much of the benefit of Node is because of Node, how much is because of JS/V8, and how much is because of evented programming generally?

For instance, if you switch from Rails to EventMachine, will you get most of the benefits of Node, or will you still be bogged down by Ruby's speed and resource consumption?

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A lot of it is thanks to V8 I think. But an issue commonly raised with EventMachine (and gevent etc. on Python) is that many common libraries contain blocking code that you cant get rid of, whereas Node modules have all been programmed to avoid blocking at all costs.

I've not seen anyone do a proper investigation, I definitely think it would be interesting.

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