As a counterpoint, I built a relatively large system using Node (this was a couple months ago, to be clear) and had issues with several modules. mysql: cannot handle binary blob columns (this is just now being fixed in an alpha version of the library). mysql: very slow parsing of large responses. aws*: many half built / half broken libraries -- nothing that met our modest needs. request: (http request library) found several issues.

Node.JS has a great community that is writing many great modules, no doubt. But the community is very young and almost by definition many of the modules are immature.

This can be very enjoyable from an engineering perspective (you get to write and hack on things that you would not otherwise), but can also slow down the process of building things since you do end up having to reinvent the wheel at times.