Would you use JavaScript compiled to C for your server applications | Hacker News Reader

Would you use JavaScript compiled to C for your server applications

9 pointsint6410 comments

Thinking about creating one. Will be mainly used for the development of server applications and later add a UI framework.

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I like Javascript, I write a lot of it. The progress that has been made through the years is pretty remarkable. Sometimes its hard to believe.

That said, javascript handles every number as a 64 bit float. For a lot of applications, that just doesn't matter. But to me, it does... its caused a lot of heart aches in my life, and for that I want to keep a better language for my server.

The plan is to provide primitive data type extensions as well which can be used in place of the "var" keyword

With servers being a commodity these days, I can only think of rare use cases where this would be helpful vs just scaling horizontally behind a load balancer. Also, in most real world systems I have seen, the real bottle neck is in the I/O and rarely in the business logic or server application level.

Thats very true. The plan was to give the user heavy asynchronous IO functionality that appear to the user as making a simple ajax call with a callback function. Provides the developer asynchronous functionality on the server side. Scope variables and so on are all handled behind the scenes.

Forget the frontend. Just make it work 'faster' than node.js and people will use it.

If you're going to be writing it, prepare your release by writing at least 5 applications with it too.

What about nodejs? Do you think the performance would be better with javascript compiled to c?

Absolutely. Node.js is still interpreted by V8 as far as i know. The runtime libs provided by node.js are all written in JS. However, With this initiative, all the runtime libs will be implemented in c as well.

V8 is a JIT interpreter. The performance benefit might be less than you would think.

thanks for the input. Will certainly look into that.

Sounds good to me. Might try it out.

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