Sorry, it wasn't my part of the project so I can't offer much detail. I know they never got as far as a Node build that passed the full test suite on some platforms. Many of the problems seemed to be around how floating point is handled on different types of CPU.
Compared to what exactly? I don't see any mainstream dynamic language except Lua doing better. Ruby? Python?
The total footprint for Node and supporting packages was taking up a few GB more than the equivalents for some of those other languages you mentioned. If you're working on a system where your non-volatile storage is something like a microSD card or flash chip, "a few GB" can be a huge difference.
If you do need native modules, the situation is slightly worse than C or C++, but not significantly: you generally need to build on a machine with the same architecture (Setting up cross-compilation with C isn't very easy either)
Sorry, our experience has been very different on both counts. Building on a machine with the same architecture isn't necessarily a reasonable option if you're targeting platforms that aren't general purpose computers, and at best probably means jumping through a lot of hoops and figuring out a lot of the details for yourself. In contrast, cross-compiling a language like C is straightforward and reliable, the tools for doing it are mature and well documented, and many developers who have worked in embedded systems are familiar with the techniques.
No. The person doing the Node version was trying to use some of the NoSQL tools, and seemed to be spending much of their time documenting and implementing things you get as standard with a SQL database. The person who wrote the C based alternative just used SQLite as a demonstration of how much easier and more robust everything could be using a different database instead.
One of the striking ironies of the project was that although in principle a dynamic language like Node doesn't need a compilation step, just the JS source, while C code has to be compiled for every target platform, the reality was that getting the C code running was dramatically easier. A well-made C library like SQLite could be installed, cross-compiled and running on all the required platforms within literally a few minutes, while Node and several major packages were so flaky that the equivalent level of real world functionality was never achieved even after several months of work. Again just for comparison, some of those other dynamic languages you mentioned were in between but much closer to the shorter end of the spectrum. The Node ecosystem, in our experience, proved to be an exceptionally bad choice for this sort of work.
I'm afraid that based on what you said, it only made it clearer that this wasn't an issue with the ecosystem but with that particular developer. I don't really see how you can extrapolate that this was the node ecosystem's fault, when you have a developer that is trying to implement SQL on top of NoSQL and pull in a gigabyte of dependencies for an embedded platform. If a C++ developer was trying to implement the app on top of MongoDB's source code, that says more about the developer then about C++ and its ecosystem.
I might concede that the node ecosystem does have a disproportionate number of people with this mindset though :)
By the way, cross-compilation is also an option, although I haven't personally tried it:
A plus would be that only native modules have to be compiled, and only once. After that its possible to set up downloading them as binary blobs.
You got me curious about the application, by the way. If you let me know what it does, it might be fun to try and implement a prototype in node (with sane dependencies and easy to deploy on a RPi)
Just to be clear in case I've given the wrong idea, my point here is not really to criticise Node in general. I'm just saying, with the benefit of hindsight of course, that it was not the ideal choice for that particular job. In particular, because of the hype around Node, I think the people making the decisions (including the developer who was working on it) honestly didn't expect that, and perhaps weren't sure how to proceed when the problems I mentioned started mounting up.
(Edit: That said, the difficulties with size, portability and dependency management in the Node ecosystem that were exposed by this particular project are more general flaws with that Node ecosystem and not specific to this particular developer.)
You got me curious about the application, by the way. If you let me know what it does, it might be fun to try and implement a prototype in node (with sane dependencies and easy to deploy on a RPi)
It really wasn't anything very complicated by database standards, just storing some settings in a central place. Those settings were a bit more complicated and inter-related in this case than you could conveniently store using something as simple as a plain text file, so a lightweight database was the next logical step. As mentioned before, it was the kind of thing where you could implement the basic infrastructure required within a few hours using more suitable tools.
Okay. I've had vastly different experience with node on ARM. Much more reasonable dependencies size then what you report (by about 2 orders of magnitude) and excellent performance from the JIT. Combined with the ability to first write dynamic code then switch to static types, as well as the memory safety, its been a lot more pleasant than working with C.
So honestly, I really can't relate to most of what you said here :)
Please keep in mind that the Raspberry Pi was only an example. We're talking about embedded here, so there are all kinds of weird and wonderful CPUs and storage systems and I/O components being used in various devices that need to run the code I'm talking about. Certainly not all of them were ARM chips. I don't know which chips caused the big problems with porting Node, nor which specific packages, so it's entirely possible that whatever you've worked on was closer to the mainstream and supported just fine.
Sorry, it wasn't my part of the project so I can't offer much detail. I know they never got as far as a Node build that passed the full test suite on some platforms. Many of the problems seemed to be around how floating point is handled on different types of CPU.
Compared to what exactly? I don't see any mainstream dynamic language except Lua doing better. Ruby? Python?
The total footprint for Node and supporting packages was taking up a few GB more than the equivalents for some of those other languages you mentioned. If you're working on a system where your non-volatile storage is something like a microSD card or flash chip, "a few GB" can be a huge difference.
If you do need native modules, the situation is slightly worse than C or C++, but not significantly: you generally need to build on a machine with the same architecture (Setting up cross-compilation with C isn't very easy either)
Sorry, our experience has been very different on both counts. Building on a machine with the same architecture isn't necessarily a reasonable option if you're targeting platforms that aren't general purpose computers, and at best probably means jumping through a lot of hoops and figuring out a lot of the details for yourself. In contrast, cross-compiling a language like C is straightforward and reliable, the tools for doing it are mature and well documented, and many developers who have worked in embedded systems are familiar with the techniques.
P.S. Based on what you said, I have a hunch that most of your troubles came from this module: https://github.com/mapbox/node-sqlite3 - is that right?
No. The person doing the Node version was trying to use some of the NoSQL tools, and seemed to be spending much of their time documenting and implementing things you get as standard with a SQL database. The person who wrote the C based alternative just used SQLite as a demonstration of how much easier and more robust everything could be using a different database instead.
One of the striking ironies of the project was that although in principle a dynamic language like Node doesn't need a compilation step, just the JS source, while C code has to be compiled for every target platform, the reality was that getting the C code running was dramatically easier. A well-made C library like SQLite could be installed, cross-compiled and running on all the required platforms within literally a few minutes, while Node and several major packages were so flaky that the equivalent level of real world functionality was never achieved even after several months of work. Again just for comparison, some of those other dynamic languages you mentioned were in between but much closer to the shorter end of the spectrum. The Node ecosystem, in our experience, proved to be an exceptionally bad choice for this sort of work.