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| 7 | <a href=/index.xml target=_blank>RSS</a></nav></header><main role=main><article itemtype=http://schema.org/Article><h1 itemtype=headline>My love and hate relationship with Node.js</h1><p><cap>post</cap>, Mar 30, 2020 on <a href=https://mitjafelicijan.com>Mitja Felicijan's blog</a><div><p>Previous project I was working on was being coded in | ||
| 8 | <a href=https://golang.org/>Golang</a>. Also was my first project using it. And damn, | ||
| 9 | that was an awesome experience. The whole thing is just superb. From how errors | ||
| 10 | are handled. The C-like way you handle compiling. The way the language is | ||
| 11 | structured making it incredibly versatile and easy to learn.<p>It may cause some pain for somebody that is not used of using interfaces to map | ||
| 12 | JSON and doing the recompilation all the time. But we have tools like | ||
| 13 | <a href=http://eradman.com/entrproject/>entr</a> and | ||
| 14 | <a href=https://www.gnu.org/software/make/>make</a> to fix that.<p>But we are not here to talk about my undying love for <strong>Golang</strong>. Only in some | ||
| 15 | way we probably should. It is an excellent example of how modern language should | ||
| 16 | be designed. And because I have used it extensively in the last couple of years | ||
| 17 | this probably taints my views of other languages. And is doing me a great | ||
| 18 | disservice. Nevertheless, here we are.<p>About two years ago I started flirting with <a href=https://nodejs.org/en/>Node.js</a> | ||
| 19 | for a project I started working on. What I wanted was to have things written in | ||
| 20 | a language that is widely used, and we could get additional developers for. As | ||
| 21 | much as <strong>Golang</strong> is amazing it's really hard to get developers for it. Even | ||
| 22 | now. And after playing around with it for a week I felt in love with the speed | ||
| 23 | of iteration and massive package ecosystem. Do you want SSO? You got it! Do you | ||
| 24 | want some esoteric library for something? There is a strong chance somebody | ||
| 25 | wrote it. It is so extensive that you find yourself evaluating packages based on | ||
| 26 | <strong>GitHub stars</strong> and number of contributors. You get swallowed by the vanity | ||
| 27 | metrics and that potentially will become the downfall of Node.js.<p>Because of the sheer amount of choice I often got anxiety when choosing | ||
| 28 | libraries. Will I choose the correct one? Is this library something that will be | ||
| 29 | supported for a foreseeable future or not? I am used of using libraries that are | ||
| 30 | being in development for 10 years plus (Python, C) and that gave me some sort of | ||
| 31 | comfort. And it is probably unfair to Node.js and community to expect same | ||
| 32 | dedication.<p>Moving forward ... Work started and things were great. <strong>Speed of iteration was | ||
| 33 | insane</strong>. For some feature that I would need a day in Golang only took me hour | ||
| 34 | or two. I became lazy! Using packages all over the place. Falling into the same | ||
| 35 | trap as others. Packages on top of packages. And <a href=https://www.npmjs.com/>npm</a> | ||
| 36 | didn't help at all. The way that the package manager works is just | ||
| 37 | horrendous. And not allowing to have node_modules outside the project is also | ||
| 38 | the stupidest idea ever.<p>So at that point I started feeling the technical debt that comes with Node.js | ||
| 39 | and the whole ecosystem. What nobody tells you is that <strong>structuring large | ||
| 40 | Node.js apps</strong> is more problematic than one would think. And going microservice | ||
| 41 | for every single thing is also a bad idea. The amount of networking you | ||
| 42 | introduce with that approach always ends up being a pain in the ass. And I don't | ||
| 43 | even want to go into system administration here. The overhead is | ||
| 44 | insane. Package-lock.json made many days feel like living hell for me. And I | ||
| 45 | would eat the cost of all this if it meant for better development | ||
| 46 | experience. Well, it didn't.<p>The <strong>lack of Typescript</strong> support in the interpreter is still mind boggling to | ||
| 47 | me. Why haven't they added native support yet for this is beyond me?! That would | ||
| 48 | have solved so many problems. Lack of type safety became a problem somewhere in | ||
| 49 | the middle of the project where the codebase was sufficiently large enough to | ||
| 50 | present problems. We started adding arguments to functions and there was <strong>no | ||
| 51 | way to implicitly define argument types</strong>. And because at that point there were | ||
| 52 | a lot of functions, it became impossible to know what each one accepts, | ||
| 53 | development became more and more trial and error based.<p>I tried <strong>implementing Typescript</strong>, but that would present a large refactor | ||
| 54 | that we were not willing to do at that point. The benefits were not enough. I | ||
| 55 | also tried <a href=https://flow.org/>Flow - static type checker</a> but implementation | ||
| 56 | was also horrible. What Typescript and Flow forces you is to have src folder and | ||
| 57 | then <strong>transpile</strong> your code into dist folder and run it with node. WTH is that | ||
| 58 | all about. Why can't this be done in memory or some virtual file system? Why? I | ||
| 59 | see no reason why this couldn't be done like this. But it is what it is. I | ||
| 60 | abandoned all hope for static type checking.<p>One of the problems that resulted from not having interfaces or types was | ||
| 61 | inability to model out our data from <strong>Elasticsearch</strong>. I could have done a | ||
| 62 | <strong>pedestrian implementation</strong> of it, but there must be a better way of doing | ||
| 63 | this without resorting to some hack basically. Or maybe I haven't found a | ||
| 64 | solution, which is also a possibility. I have looked, though. No juice!<p><strong>Error handling?</strong> Is that a joke?<p>Thank god for <strong>await/async</strong>. Without it, I would have probably just abandoned | ||
| 65 | the whole thing and went with something else like Python. That's all I am going | ||
| 66 | to say about this :)<p>I started asking myself a question if Node.js is actually ready to be used in a | ||
| 67 | <strong>large scale applications</strong>? And this was a totally wrong question. What I | ||
| 68 | should have been asking myself was, how to use Node.js in large scale | ||
| 69 | application. And you don't get this in <strong>marketing material</strong> for Express or Koa | ||
| 70 | etc. They never tell you this. Making Node.js scale on infrastructure or in | ||
| 71 | codebase is really <strong>more of an art than a science</strong>. And just like with the | ||
| 72 | whole JavaScript ecosystem:<ul><li>impossible to master,<li>half of your time you work on your tooling,<li>just accept transpilers that convert one code into another (holly smokes),<li>error handling is a joke,<li>standards? What standards?</ul><p>But on the other hand. As I did, you will also learn to love it. Learn to use it | ||
| 73 | quickly and do impossible things in crazy limited time.<p>I hate to admit it. But I love Node.js. Dammit, I love it :)<p>2023 Update: I hate Node.js!</div></article></main><section><hr><h2>Posts from blogs I follow around the net</h2><ul><li><a href=https://chotrin.org/writing/2023-10-20.html target=_blank rel=noopener>OpenBSD upgrade and fall things.</a><div>Been AFK for a bit. It's autumn and I upgraded this server to OpenBSD 7.4! — <a href=https://chotrin.org>chötrin's wiki.</a><li><a href=https://mirzapandzo.com/next-image-url-parameter-is-valid-but-upstream-response-is-invalid target=_blank rel=noopener>Next/Image "url" parameter is valid but upstream response is invalid</a><div>Getting "url" parameter is valid but upstream response is invalid error with Next/Image on WSL2 — <a href=https://mirzapandzo.com/>Mirza Pandzo's Blog</a><li><a href=https://drewdevault.com/2023/10/13/Going-off-script.html target=_blank rel=noopener>Going off-script</a><div>There is a phenomenon in society which I find quite bizarre. Upon our entry to | ||
| 74 | this mortal coil, we are endowed with self-awareness, agency, and free will. | ||
| 75 | Each of th… — <a href=https://drewdevault.com>Drew DeVault's blog</a><li><a href=https://solar.lowtechmagazine.com/2023/10/workshop-in-rotterdam-how-to-build-a-bike-generator/ target=_blank rel=noopener>Workshop in Rotterdam: How to Build a Bike Generator</a><div>Afbeelding: Low-tech Magazine workshop in Rotterdam, the Netherlands. Poster: Marie Verdeil. Image: Sara Vercauteren | ||
| 76 | The workshop takes place on behalf of the “Hou… — <a href=https://solar.lowtechmagazine.com/posts/>LOW←TECH MAGAZINE English</a><li><a href="http://offbeatpursuit.com:80/blog/?id=24" target=_blank rel=noopener>Printf debugging</a><div>tags: | ||
| 77 | plan9 | ||
| 78 | There’s no shame in that. Yes, there is documentation, code to be | ||
| 79 | read, and debuggers to be used. But sometimes you just need to “see” | ||
| 80 | what is happening. | ||
| 81 | So… — <a href=http://offbeatpursuit.com:80/blog/>WLOG - blog</a><li><a href=https://neil.computer/notes/chart-of-accounts-for-startups-and-saas-companies/ target=_blank rel=noopener>Chart of Accounts for Startups and SaaS Companies</a><div>Accounting is fundamental to starting a business. You need to have a basic understanding of accounting principles and essential bookkeeping. I had to learn it. Ther… — <a href=https://neil.computer/>Neil Panchal</a><li><a href=https://journal.valeriansaliou.name/deploy-a-nomad-cluster-on-alpine-linux-with-vultr/ target=_blank rel=noopener>Deploy a Nomad Cluster on Alpine Linux with Vultr</a><div>After spending countless hours trying to understand how to deploy my apps on Kubernetes for the first time to host Mirage, an AI API service that I run, I ended up … — <a href=https://journal.valeriansaliou.name/>Valerian Saliou</a><li><a href=https://jcs.org/2023/10/17/wikipedia target=_blank rel=noopener>Wikipedia Reader 1.0 Released</a><div>Wikipedia Reader | ||
| 82 | 1.0 has been released: | ||
| 83 | wikipedia-1.0.sit | ||
| 84 | (StuffIt 3 archive, includes | ||
| 85 | source code | ||
| 86 | and THINK C 5 project file) | ||
| 87 | SHA256: 360e12d064f6579695f1e627ce34cb2f0… — <a href=https://jcs.org/>joshua stein</a></ul><p><a href=https://git.sr.ht/~sircmpwn/openring>Generated with openring.</a></section><footer><hr><p><big><strong>Want to comment or have something to add?</strong></big><p>You can write me an email | ||
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