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Discussion on: Why Node.js For Web Development in 2020?

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chrstnfrrs profile image
Christian Farris

What's the biggest reason not to use Node? Why isn't it the default choice?

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mcartoixa profile image
Mac

Javascript is hard (cf. github.com/getify/You-Dont-Know-JS) and it requires a lot of self-discipline. If your team is not ready to accept that, I would say Node is a bad choice.

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prashanth1k profile image
Prashanth Krishnamurthy
  1. Lack of typing pushes many errors to runtime rather than compile time. Typescript has largely taken this issue off the table, but hey many people continue to use Javascript
  2. Single-threaded nature is not right up on everyone's alley. Frameworks and clusters mitigate this somewhat, but it is easy to block threads.
  3. (2) => CPU intensive operations are not handled as well as other languages
  4. Dependencies - it is great to have thousands of open libraries and the dependency tree that's a mile long. But, not if you are a financial firm which deals with sensitive data
  5. There is also dissatisfaction about all numbers being floats, consistent performance, and on and on making Node a difficult choice

Many large companies (including a few financial companies) use Node. I use Node since I can avoid the verbosity and get stuff done sooner while keeping the code base simple. Finally -

  • as beginners: we just try out a couple of good frameworks - ASP.NET, Fiber / Gin, a few frameworks on Node, see which of them resonate for a given problem, and just pick one up.
  • as enterprises: we just follow the "company-wide standards" that have been in place forever. No one ever heard of people getting fired for choosing IBM, right?
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destroyer22719 profile image
Nathan Cai

Hi there! In the world of server side programming, NodeJS is extremely late to the party. Popular server side languages such as PHP, Java, ASP. Net, Ruby, etc. Were released in the 1990s to the early 2000s. Heck, PHP was released in 1994. NodeJS on the other hand, did come in the earliest as technologically possible with the release of the V8 Engine, it was still really new and released in 2009. I know I am extremely biased but NodeJS is a serious competitor to other server side languages. But starting your server all over again from scratch to another language isn't something you can do whenever you want.

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andrewbaisden profile image
Andrew Baisden

11 years ago and still immature it takes a while for things to progress. Everybody forgot about Deno already 😂