The Argument from Vitriolic Invective

I was sent the following link after posting yesterday about node.js:

http://www.teddziuba.com/2011/10/straight-talk-on-event-loops.html

I think it is safe to say that Ted Dziuba thinks that event-driven systems in general, and node.js specifically, are bad tech. And he is particularly insistent that JavaScript has no place running on “The Server”. I am all too familiar with this particular song. While working as a Technical Evangelist for the .NET Framework, and then working as the Performance Program Manager for the CLR, I heard it played more times than I have heard “Elmo’s Song” played, and my kids are one and three, so you get the point.

When .NET came on the scene at the turn of the century I heard a cacophony of grumblings from the Java community about how it would never rival the performance of the [whichever] JVM or the breadth of the JDK and 3rd-party Java libraries, from the C/C++ community that its performance would suck so badly that it would be unusable for high-performance workloads, from the Visual Basic community that it would never replace good-old VB, and from the academic community that it would never be suitable for teaching or research. They all turned out to be mostly wrong. Yes, there are some workloads that still need C/C++ because of their extreme performance requirements, but for the vast majority of workloads well-written .NET Framework code holds its own (and not to mention the developer productivity gains!). And obviously the .NET Framework’s performance has improved over the decade so there remain few workloads which are beyond its capabilities. Of course anyone can write poorly performing code, but that is equally true for C++ as it is for Erlang, Scala, Java, C#, F# or TSQL.

So what’s my beef with Mr. Dziuba’s post?

Obviously he knows his proverbial stuff, but this post comes across as nothing more than a bitter rant, despite the fact that it has “math” in it. And his assertion that “threaded programming, … is easier to understand than callback driven programming” made me literally laugh out loud. Perhaps it is true for him, but for the vast majority of developers out there multi-threaded programming is a source of wide-eyed terror; the appropriately ominous words “deadlock”, “race condition”, “convoy”, “starvation” and “Heisenbug” come to mind. Perhaps he is correct about the performance characteristics of multi-threaded versus event-based systems, but in the end if node.js is good enough for most workloads, and is easier for developers to work with, then who gives a rat’s arse.

His final assertion that JavaScript in not appropriate on “The Server”, also made me laugh; as if the server is some sort of sacred ground not to be touched by the unwashed feet of a lowly scripting language. Node.js is based on the V8 JavaScript engine from Google, which compiles the JavaScript down to native code on first execution and has a few tricks up its sleeve to avoid the performance penalties associated with dynamic or “duck” typing. No, it’s not as fast as an equivalent C, C++ or x86 assembly program, but I don’t doubt that it will perform adequately for the majority of use cases. And JavaScript is not standing still either. Not satisfied with having the fastest JavaScript runtime, Google today announced an early preview of Dart; a new language that is based on JavaScript that, among many other language enhancements, addresses the performance limitations of the current incarnation of JavaScript. It will run as native code on the server or as compiled JavaScript in browsers that don’t support it natively, which is currently all of them including Chrome. Unfortunately V8 does not yet natively support Dart either (though I don’t doubt it soon will), and there are no binaries available, so if you want to play with it you are going to have to download the source and build it yourself.

Companies like Intel are also working on providing technology that addresses the performance issues with JavaScript. JavaScript is already the dominant client-side development language, and it looks like it may soon have a significant footprint on “The Server” too, despite Ted Dziuba’s strong objections.