Hacker News Reader

Comment by tjholowaychuk | Hacker News Reader

node's error handling is by far its weakest point IMO, Go is a lot better in that respect, but a full javascript stack has its advantages

View on HN

FWIW (to give a little context to this comment):

TJ is the author of Jade, Stylus, Express, Connect, Component, Kue, Mongoose, Knox, Cluster (before the bundled cluster module), Canvas, N, Commander, etc, etc.

If anyone has a perch upon which to criticize Node, he's certainly amongst the most qualified.

I remember you criticized on twitter this point of Node some time ago and the response of some leaders of Node community was like "Sorry, this isn't Erlang" and "Erlang is better but it's harder"

Yeah, pretty naive responses, but understandably most people who have been in the community for a long time don't want to admit the reality, seeing as node is what powers most of our jobs haha. Bottom line is node has a massive flaw, and it should be fixed, at least core members should have interest in fixing it.

Especially with tools like Go there's a lot of pressure to NOT use node in production when great alternatives are available. Node still has the "JavaScript edge", but if fault tolerance remains as poor as it is now that won't matter for long.

Your are right.

Once ES6 is here(when? i dont know), things are going to get better i think,

but Go way of dealing with concurrency in general is a lot better than javascript's for now.

Generators will help a tiny bit but certainly not nearly as much as something like coroutines with separate stacks. I know the node-fiber guy(s) had some issues with v8's internal stack usage so it doesn't seem like a near-future possibility to really have light-weight coros in node :(

Reply on news.ycombinator.com