On Wed, Nov 01, 2017 at 04:13:51PM -0700, Brian Bennett wrote: > SmartOS is used as a base platform for Triton (née SmartDataCenter), a > datacenter orchestration platform. SmartDataCenter was written in js, so it > made sense to write many of the necessary platform utilities in js as well > because they either needed to work with upstack services or could share > libraries. > > There's nothing in the Unix philosophy that dictates what language things > should be written in. The components written in node, do follow very well the > Unix philosophy. > > * Write programs that do one thing and do it well. > * Write programs to work together. > * Write programs to handle text streams, because that is a universal > interface. > > Node.js is quite good at fulfilling those tenets.
true, node.js (and javascript) might be good at fulfilling those tenets, but then again, so is java. and that must be why java has been removed by almost all "illumos" distributions from their base installs. :) > Additionally, a lot of effort has been put into mdb and dtrace for debugging > node.js. Both of which are already used extensively by us for debugging the > kernel and various C programs. So writing systems utilities in js gives us > the same debugging workflow as C, which isn't something that can currently be > done with languages like python, ruby, rust, or go (go is getting better, but > that's only fairly recent, and still has a way to go). there's also something simpler, it's called "jq". and it's parentage is "sed", 'awk' and "grep", so you get the idea! > So, there were a lot of reasons (and more than the ones I mentioned here). > Node.js was best suited to what we needed at the time. true, the "first system syndrome". but, it would be wiser to move towards the second and third systems now? ~mayuresh ------------------------------------------- smartos-discuss Archives: https://www.listbox.com/member/archive/184463/=now RSS Feed: https://www.listbox.com/member/archive/rss/184463/25769125-55cfbc00 Modify Your Subscription: https://www.listbox.com/member/?member_id=25769125&id_secret=25769125-7688e9fb Powered by Listbox: http://www.listbox.com
