> What makes it order of magnitudes more performant than Ruby
Source for the "orders of magnitude" anywhere in the last year or so? Ruby with EventMachine outperformed Node significantly when I tested websocket chat servers.
Source for the "orders of magnitude" anywhere in the last year or so? Ruby with EventMachine outperformed Node significantly when I tested websocket chat servers.
One of the frequently overlooked properties of Javascript/Node is that it's async-everything.
I'd be curious to hear more about this benchmark.
But there are almost zero async-everything options in the space. And being confined to a second-class async subworld inside a synchronous ecosystem is a classic error-prone challenge whether you're using Twisted, Event Machine, Tokio, or Netty.
It's a pretty big downside of using Event Machine which even created its own networking primitives instead of using those in the Ruby stdlib.
I was talking about the general case of everything being async in JS. That's frequently touted as a benefit of JS, but it's utterly maddening to workaday web developers. You want your requests to be served async (which should just be handled by whatever framework you're using), but inside of a single request you mostly just want to write synchronous code, even when you're dealing with IO. It's a lot easier to reason about.
Consider the simple example of just running two unrelated database/network queries at the same time which is basically a ubiquitous desire when writing a web service:
const [user, stats] = await Promise.all([
db.getUser(42),
cache.fetchStats()
])
// This fn is built into Bluebird and trivial to find 8-line impl for.
// getA..getD are just functions that return promises so they can be
// created lazily.
const [a,b,c,d] = await Promise.map([getA, getB, getC, getD],
(fn) => fn(),
{ concurrency: 2 }
)