This change is a sign of Node's shift from improving the core to making modules work better. I see it that way, at least. Isaac is the author of npm after all.
And what's the core missing, would you say? Personally, I thought the cluster stuff was already getting heavy.
Yes. And you're right, but then it's not often that much better than other languages. Personally I'd rather they get the core language finished first (though their concept of "finished" and mine seem to differ).
> And what's the core missing, would you say? Personally, I thought the cluster stuff was already getting heavy.
There's no way to lock a file (making file writes completely fragile). There's no way to seek() in a file. There's no way to open a file with O_EXCL set (meaning lockless file writing is impossible). There's no temp file functionality in core, and without O_EXCL the solutions available for this on npm are utterly broken. There's still major bugs in the Crypto routines (they take Strings instead of Buffers in various places)... Honestly I could go on.
Most of the rest of what you describe is APIs that need to be polished and refined a bit. The boundaries are well defined at this point, though. We probably won't add another builtin module at this point, or dramatically expand what any of them can do. (I don't consider seek() dramatic, it's just tricky to get right given JavaScript's annoying Number problems.)
That's great to know. Obviously I'm just following the docs.
> Most of the rest of what you describe is APIs that need to be polished and refined a bit
My concern is merely that there have been a number of statements put out saying "we won't be adding anything more to the API", and that we are basically almost at 1.0, at which point there won't ever be anything added to the core API. Lack of flock() is huge (you can't write to an existing file safely without it - and Node developers are doing that all the time, including your own NPM). Lack of an ability to create temporary files safely seems a fundamental weakness - especially when so many Node apps are dealing with file uploads - that's a disaster waiting to happen. We are going to be dealing with Node.js security bugs because of these issues for a VERY long time.
flock() is not trivial to do in a portable way. For a unix-only flock(), check out the fs-ext addon. Same for mktemp.
I wouldn't be opposed to either being in core if it could be done in a clean way, but this is just adding another knob that can be done with an addon easily enough. If you care more about having flock() than about writing portable programs, then that's what the fs-ext addon is for.
> We are going to be dealing with Node.js security bugs because of these issues for a VERY long time.
Of course we'll be "dealing with Node.js security bugs for a VERY long time", because we'll be using Node.js for a very long time. Software is buggy, and many bugs are security hazards. We'll be dealing with "Unix security bugs" and "C security bugs" and "Java security bugs" forever as well.
Please do not make vague suggestions about security issues. Either you've found an issue, and should be submitting it, or you haven't, and are just spreading fud.
Perl, Python and Ruby manage it.
> For a unix-only flock(), check out the fs-ext addon
Which I wrote.
> Of course we'll be "dealing with Node.js security bugs for a VERY long time", because we'll be using Node.js for a very long time.
That's not quite what I meant - I mean that people right now are writing temp files in LOTS of Node.js applications in an insecure way. It's good that O_EXCL is available, I'll try and submit a patch to node-temp, but really temp file creation should be in core (amongst other things).
This isn't a vague suggestion. There are COUNTLESS security bugs created every day by insecure temp file creation. Let's see, from npm these packages have security bugs because they rely on the insecure node-temp: ShipItJS assetgraph-builder confy filerepl gracie joose js-loader muffin nerve redisfs.
smf(5) can get you part of the way there, but not if you're (say) writing some system bits that you need to deploy on platforms in addition to SunOS. Plus, if you can avoid depending on any not-just-pure-JS modules then you can deploy one tree onto all of your platforms without additional build steps, C++ compile/ABI issues, etc.
The fact that they're shifting focus isn't a big concern. I'd at least wait until Isaac comes out and says what the future roadmap is before criticizing it.
What "finished" means in this context is that we've established which problems we're going to solve, and the solutions to those are well-understood. There aren't new problems that node-core is setting out to address by making changes to the binary itself.
The new hard things to tackle are above the core layer - CI, userland module documentation and discoverability, binary deployments, etc. There's quite a bit of polish and refinement to be done at the lower level, but the paths are clear at this point, as far as that goes.