I was recently excited to find out that V8 is starting work on adding generators support. Then I heard about asm.js and looked into Firefox's *Monkey (OdinMonkey, SpiderMonkey, etc.) series of JS engines. Performance is good, they've already implemented many ECMAScript 6 features, and now asm.js support is added. Looking at all this, it feels like V8 is falling behind and stagnant. Also Google is working on Dart which is a competitor to JS technologies. Mozilla seems to be "all in" on JS tech instead of divided like Google. If node.js used *Monkey instead of V8, I can imagine a future world like this:
1) Node.js would get future ECMAScript updates faster (ECMAScript 6, 7, etc.) 2) In the python community, the common way to handle performance is to first write it in python, then optimize heavy loop/CPU areas in C code. A similar thing could be done in node.js, write first in regular JS, optimize heavy loops/CPU with LLJS (http://mbebenita.github.com/LLJS it's a static typed dialect of JS) or C/C++. 3) Existing native libraries could compiled to asm.js, expanding the areas node.js can be used. For instance, in python NumPy is a python layer for very fast C math libraries. Switching node.js to *Monkey or at least making it VM agnostic would be a huge task. And it's possible V8 will eventually implement asm.js and other JS technologies made by Mozilla. But it seems like Mozilla is pushing the boundaries of JS technology and opening paths to new areas. I'm curious if the node.js developers have discussed the idea? -- -- Job Board: http://jobs.nodejs.org/ Posting guidelines: https://github.com/joyent/node/wiki/Mailing-List-Posting-Guidelines You received this message because you are subscribed to the Google Groups "nodejs" group. To post to this group, send email to [email protected] To unsubscribe from this group, send email to [email protected] For more options, visit this group at http://groups.google.com/group/nodejs?hl=en?hl=en --- You received this message because you are subscribed to the Google Groups "nodejs" group. To unsubscribe from this group and stop receiving emails from it, send an email to [email protected]. For more options, visit https://groups.google.com/groups/opt_out.
