Io.js – What You Need to Know | Hacker News Reader

Io.js – What You Need to Know

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44 pointsneiesc16 comments

From what I can see the main differences with node.js is pulling more regularly from V8 and using semantic versioning. Are there any more differences?

As a recent convert to Node who switched to it because I thought we'd be closing in on 1.0 this year and instead got ... crickets. For my part, "pulling more regularly from V8" is enough all by itself.

The trademark is in the public domain which means it can never be sold. A company such as Oracle acquiring Joyent (and thus owning NodeJS) is a very realistic possibility, if not inevitable. You don't need anyones permission to use "iojs". You may use it for a book title, conference, training course, or service without needing permission or paying anyone to use it.

iojs follows an open governance model which means that large US corporations have equal input to everyone else on the direction iojs heads. Not any more or any less.

Edit: I would like to clarify that my opinion is not in any way based on Joyent not fulfilling their duty to the public. I am a former employee at Joyent and I have nothing but respect and praise for the work they have done WRT NodeJS. I hope to see NodeJS continue to thrive under Joyent's guidance. That said, I am supportive of an open initiative that iojs is attempting to achieve. I believe there are some long term benefits to having a release that is completely sheltered from any corporate initiative. My view is not meant to be antagonistic toward Joyent nor any of the NodeJS contributors.

The author seems like an optimist, but "many core contributors will help maintain both node.js and io.js" seems to disagree with reality, since indutny has been landing PRs to node only in the forks. He's a core contributor.

If he needs sign-off or whatever, it's not like he doesn't have friends in all the forks. I'm pre-emptively calling bullshit on anyone who invokes the Joyent bogeyman here; tons of PRs land without their involvement. What's the difference here.

That's pretty antagonistic IYAM.

Fedor kind of started the whole thing, though. http://www.infoworld.com/article/2855057/application-develop...

I agree .. this is basically what Rocket is doing is response to the commercial support of Docker. I haven't seen what tangible value io.js or Rocket are going to add. It's basically 'we aren't a corporation' and that doesn't add value by itself. If they want to look at a good example of a clone that has added value they should look at Mono/Xamarin.

> I agree .. this is basically what Rocket is doing is response to the commercial support of Docker.

What? That's what came away with? Even shykes didn't accuse them of that.

Frequent releases add value, Faster integration of v8 updates add value. It's not as simple as you state.

I'm not following your argument. They stated "many core contributors" not "all core contributors". Obviously some people will only work with one project or the other.

Could you clarify?

No, because it's perfectly clear. But perhaps I can restate: indutny's behaving in bad faith, which should be perfectly obvious to anyone. Max Ogden (the original and unofficial author of the opinion posted above) would like to believe there is no antagonism here.

If this were just some third party, perhaps this wouldn't be significant. But indutny's on node core, the technical committee, the advisory board meetings, and is the original forker of io.js. His actions are central here.

So can we say Joyent blew it with too much corporatism?

We could say that the community wants to "move fast and break things", and (they feel that?) Joyent doesn't.

Does Io.js offer more performance than Node.js?

Although "more performance" doesn't mean much, the short answer is: maybe, yes.

They want to keep up to date with v8 better. Newer v8 could outperform older v8. node's is pretty old (2012) apparently.

So IO.js will update to V8 Turbofan when its released?

I thought you were being facetious! In case anyone else also thought that, turbofan is a real thing: " [1]

> Recently, Google engineers landed a new optimizing JavaScript compiler for V8, codenamed TurboFan. As the name implies, this is supposed to further improve JavaScript execution speed, likely to be better than its predecessor, Crankshaft. While TurboFan is still in its early stage, that doesn’t mean we can’t take a look at it.

I imagine that it has to get stable for v8 first before it is even considered, but that's exactly the example of potential "more performance" in io.js

[1] http://ariya.ofilabs.com/2014/08/javascript-and-v8-turbofan....

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