That article is just plain old trolling.

That is a very naive implementation and anyone who knows node would be an
idiot to do it that way.

Since node is an evented model, if you do any sort of heavy computation it
is essentially the same as blocking I/O (not really, but for the sake of
argument), which means the server can't handle any more requests while the
computation is happening and things slow down.

While that sends like a big problem, it really isn't.

There are lots of ways to handle that, the best way being to separate the
computation out into a different process and register a callback for when it
finishes. That way, the computation happens elsewhere while the server
continues to serve requests.

Node is different model, and you have to adhere to that model or else you
might as well not use node. While this forces you to re-think a few things,
the benefits you gain vastly outweigh the effort.

In short, Ted Dziuba likes to get attention through finding stupid
arguments that are just to get people talking, ignore it and take a stab at
node, its a blast and delivers awesome performance if you don't do stupid
things.

On that note, if you are interested in learning node, I have started a
node.js group here in provo, and there is also utah.js which meets in Layton
who talk about lots of node stuff. We have yet to schedule another meeting
for here in provo but it should hopefully happen soon. Just keep an eye on
the list and I will announce it here when we schedule another one.

On Tue, Oct 4, 2011 at 9:11 AM, Richard Esplin <richard-lists@espl...>wrote:

> I have never played with node.js, but I hear lots of hype. Today twitter
> directed me to this article:
>
> http://teddziuba.com/2011/10/node-js-is-cancer.html
>
> Anyone have an informed opinion on the thesis that Node.js is cancer?
>
> Thanks,
>
> Richard
>
> On Friday September 30 2011 11:22:31 Kyle Mathews <mathews.kyle@gmai...>
> wrote:
> > The easiest way to get started doing something realtime IMO is node.js
> and
> > socket.io. Socket.io is an abstraction library that provides a
> > WebSocket-like api but that works on all browsers, not just those that
> > support WebSockets. Node.js is server-side javascript and its goal is to
> > "provide an easy way to build scalable network programs."
> >
> > I've been using both of them pretty heavily for the past couple of months
> > and they are both very easy to get going with and are very very
> performant.
> > Even a simple light-weight server should be able to handle 10s of
> thousands
> > of connected players.
> >
> > Throw in Coffeescript and Brunch <http://brunchwithcoffee.com/> for
> > client-side development and you have a very nice development stack!
> <snip>
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