🐒 A New Runtime Milestone for Node.js 🐒

# [ $davids.sh ] · message #211

• @ [ $davids.sh ] · # 1110

  Wow, they really pulled something off!

  So, (1) Node.js's single-thread limitation is somewhat addressed by serverless, but (2) self-hosted serverless is complex, (3) the code needs to meet Lambda requirements, and (4) starting a container to run your function is a very time-consuming process.

  I read a while back that some folks were developing an interesting concept: they'd pre-warm a bunch of Node.js runtimes (V8) and run your Lambdas directly on them (like an "eval").

  Turns out, this is Cloudflare Workers, and they've RELEASED THIS RUNTIME OPEN SOURCE!!!

  https://github.com/cloudflare/workerd

  Serverless is cool, of course, but I honestly don't care much about it (it's a great technology, will be useful, we'll use it, but most of the time, I personally just don't need it). Node.js and Python have already won there and will continue to evolve.

  The coolest thing about this technology, folks, is a multi-threaded Node.js runtime with heap and cross-lambda communication... they're fulfilling my dream – a bastardized Go written in TS 😍😍😍

  (And I'm not kidding)

  I really hope people pick up this concept and continue to develop it (and I'd love to build a service for testing on it). We'll see, JS is the stack where people love concepts so much that I might invest in the development of my own unique runtime.

• @ [ $davids.sh ] · # 1112

  Ah yes, @arutyunov, this is your dream too: PHP.js - a runtime instead of Apache, and Node becomes purely a scripting language

• @ Artur G · # 1113

  CF runtime has a browser in their lambdas. 😁 That's quite a shift in mentality.

  There are also functions on wasi. I don't remember the company name.

• @ [ $davids.sh ] · # 1114

  Judging by the code, they modified V8 (for example, there's no DOM, renderer, or anything like that), which seems more like a stripped-down Node.js than a browser to me.

  The shift is 100% and I don't think it's the last one.

  I'm ready to predict: (1) that even if not this runtime, a similar one will appear, (2) official Node.js will start leaning away from async/await towards generators/fibers, (3) TS will learn to compile to WASM and its own virtual TS machine will appear, (4) another 850 frontend frameworks will be released (although by the time I wrote this comment, they've probably already been released, gained 50,000 stars, and been deprecated).

• @ Kirill Arutyunov · # 1115

  We already have Roadrunner, just so you know.

• @ [ $davids.sh ] · # 1116

  Wow, first time seeing this, interesting

  Are these in use?