I am writing Nodejs because I have to, not because I want to. Having used it now, I will never ever start a new project with it.
Nodejs's concurrency controls, ability to scale, tools for reliability and observability are so far behind from the BEAM ecosystem. I sometimes think people think Elixir is too good to be true because they're too used to platforms not designed to be resilient.
It took me months before it sank in that Nodejs async wasn't really async as I knew it from Elixir -- there's an implicit queue, and no true suspension of the execution flow.
One justification for this was that it is supposed to make it easier to reason. It made it more difficult for me to reason -- maybe single-threaded async reactor is a poor substitute for immutability.
Unhandled promise rejection is an example of a consequence of this design. That's not really a thing in Elixir by design. But in the Nodejs world, people don't even see it as a design flaw. It makes reasoning about reliability much more difficult.
> One justification for this was that it is supposed to make it easier to reason.
It’s a valid justification because it makes it substantially easier to reason compared to mutable multithreaded languages/runtimes such as C(++), Java and C#.
Eg a semaphore in JS doesn’t exist. It’s just a boolean. Interlocked Increment doesn’t exist. It’s just someVar++. And so on, it’s very nice.
That doesn’t mean that there aren’t other setups (such as immutable data with message passing) that are even easier to reason about. Every new tech compares itself to the current mainstream.
The whole reason Nodejs exists is because programmers eternally re-invent the wheel instead of accepting that there are already some pretty good wheels that they probably have no chance of matching.
I am writing Nodejs because I have to, not because I want to. Having used it now, I will never ever start a new project with it.
Nodejs's concurrency controls, ability to scale, tools for reliability and observability are so far behind from the BEAM ecosystem. I sometimes think people think Elixir is too good to be true because they're too used to platforms not designed to be resilient.