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Comment by shtylman | Hacker News Reader

Because writing plain javascript is simpler for the majority of people to understand and will run in more places without the need for custom setups. Module authors will not write to these custom implementations since it would greatly limit the audience for their module.

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So, basically, because threading is hard.

Lol, keep killing it web bros.

(Full disclosure: I am, in fact, using Node now, and there is nothing quite so painful as the lack of coroutine or fiber or thread support. Cluster is cool, but only if you want to make a bunch of processes.)

I don't necessarily want threading in Node.js, but it would be nice to have coroutines/green threads...something simple that scales across CPUs, at least. Unfortunately with JavaScript I think the best you're going to get is Node's cluster module, because of the threading limitations with V8 and other JavaScript engines. Realistically, it's a trade off - Node.js is easy and quick to work with, but the only way to take full advantage of the machine's processing power is through forking processes.

Seriously, green threads with yield() and autoyield on blocking operations would be great. Sometimes the easiest way to write a program is to present it as a logical flow of events, and let the machine/operating environment hide the async nature of life from you.

Then again, that would mean reinventing (again) core OS functionality in Javascript. Le sigh.

People write modules for node to an audience rather than to scratch their own itch?

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