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Comment by hrns | Hacker News Reader

Isn't Node API an equivalent of go standard library?

Yes but it's super barebones. Its successor, Ryan Dahl's second attempt at JS runtime, Deno, has a much fuller standard library (inspired by Go).

I wish we'd stop trying to make broken languages work. This feels like hill-climbing into the strangest local optimum possible. JS is not the best example of an interpreted language. Wouldn't it be better to put Python in the browser than to put JS on the server? Can't wait for WASM to be a first-rate citizen on the web so we don't have to deal with this anymore.

> Wouldn't it be better to put Python in the browser than to put JS on the server?

I think that's a categorical "no", because Python isn't an objectively better language than JavaScript. I'm saying this as a Python developer since v1.5 (>20 years).

Subjective opinions are a different matter.

I think you would be surprised to learn that more developers love TypeScript than Python these days, according to one popular survey.[0]

All of this is subjective, of course. WASM isn't going to make Python the language of choice for browsers any time soon.

[0]: https://insights.stackoverflow.com/survey/2021#section-most-...

I don't think the comparison is entirely fair since one of the main attractions of TS is that it runs in the browser. Python can unfortunately not fill the same role right now. So I'd keep that in mind while looking at that ranking. But yes, I see many people like it. Maybe I'm missing something, but it's still too JavaScript-y for me.

Yes Node.js ships with what is effectively a very thin standard library for some low level things like interacting with the file system, the process model, some security features like TLS.

The Fetch API, supported by browsers for over 5 years now, is only now making it into the official Node API https://blog.logrocket.com/fetch-api-node-js/

Node.js had `http` in its standard library for a long time though.

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