[ryah]

Something that's different, at least from POE, EventMachine, Twisted is that it is attempting non-blocking purity. You can snub your nose at this but it turns out to be very important. It ends up abstracting away a problem in a way that EventMachine or Twisted will never be able to do simply because of the existence of massive amounts of blocking Ruby and Python libraries. The programmer simply doesn't have to know what non-blocking I/O is - they don't have to know that if they do "node script.js < hugefile" - that STDIN_FILENO cannot be selected on.

Erlang is different. Node presents a different programming model than Erlang - Node handles thousands of connections per process - and keeps itself close to the metal. Erlang is it's own operating system handling one connection per processes but allowing very many processes. Is Node's model better? Well at the moment it's incomparable since Erlang is very much a solid, production ready system and Node is not more than some dude's hack. But supposing that Node becomes stable and usable at some point, a major advantage of the Node model is that for the first 10,000-1,000,000 concurrent connections the programmer doesn't have to know anything about concurrency - a single process will just handle it. There is no forking or IPC - it's just synchronous events and callbacks. In Erlang you have to think about about IPC on the first connection. The Erlang-model might turn out to be the wrong level of process granularity. Maybe the right level of process granularity is how computers are already designed: 10,000-1,000,000 connections per process, use one per core.

I also wish for less hype around the Node project but I think you're short changing it by saying it's same thing as Twisted but in Javascript instead of Python. The main selling point is not that you can run the same code on browser and server. The main selling point is that you don't have to know what you're doing, at least for the first 10,000 concurrent connections.

[jerf]

"There is no forking or IPC - it's just synchronous events and callbacks. In Erlang you have to think about about IPC on the first connection. The Erlang-model might turn out to be the wrong level of process granularity. Maybe the right level of process granularity is how computers are already designed: 10,000-1,000,000 connections per process, use one per core."

Also false. An Erlang "process" is not an OS process. It already works the way you say, except it can use multiple cores simultaneously. Automatically. Node.js has nothing on Erlang except a familiar syntax. Nor does IPC come up like some kind of blocker; it's baked into the core and quite natural, often all wrapped up behind a simple function call.

And let's not even talk about the baked-in clusterable Mnesia database or the OTP library, which Node.js can only dream about. (Erlang isn't just multicore, it's pretty easy to make it multi-system.) Or how Erlang has code replacement (the Node.js complaint of the day) built right in to the core, where it really has to be for it to work. And Erlang laughs at your "non-blocking purity"; in Erlang, you can call sleep and it won't block anything! No special support needed, no magic from the user, no arranging things in callbacks manually (how 1980s). Try that in Node.js.

It's actually impossible for Node.js to do some of these things because you have to start with them.

You don't understand how Erlang works. That's fine, except you started to criticize it. I refer back to my previous comment that the people hyping Node.js don't seem to have used the competition. Maybe my problem is that I have used the competition, quite extensively. Come to think of it, I've yet to hear anyone say "Gosh, I was using Erlang but Node.js is just so awesome I had to switch!:" That probably says something important.

[ryah]

You should read my reply again (or maybe for the first time) and comprehend. I did not say nor imply that I think Erlang's processes are OS processes. Sorry for not using quotes ('process') if that's what has confused you so deeply.

[grayrest]

> I also wish for less hype around the Node project

I'm tremendously amused that you write this when every other poster on HN is desperately trying to generate hype for their project/company.