The Downfall of Imperative Programming

["Sönke]

On Tuesday, 10 April 2012 at 10:38:28 UTC, James Miller wrote:
> * Marco Leise <Marco.Leise at gmx.de> [2012-04-10 05:57:52 +0200]:
>
>> Am Tue, 10 Apr 2012 12:50:32 +1200
>> schrieb James Miller <james at aatch.net>:
>> 
>> > Slightly OT: With the unstoppable march of parallel 
>> > programming, does
>> > anybody else find node.js incredibly infuriating, since it is
>> > single-core.
>> 
>> Don't blame the library. EcmaScript was designed to be 
>> single-core. I imagine that web scripting language to be much 
>> more complex with multi-threading in user code. You are using 
>> the wrong tool for the job ;)
>> 
>> --
>> Marco
>> 
>
> I meant that the fact that node.js is gaining popularity, 
> despite the
> fact that we want to move away from single-threaded 
> applications, is
> incredibly backwards.
>
> I'm not using node, I have to use PHP at work, which at the 
> very least
> gets help from the webserver in terms of parallel processing.
>
> --
> James Miller

I haven't used it, but node.js has clusters
(http://nodejs.org/docs/v0.6.0/api/cluster.html) which often
should be just as good.

But performing I/O using single-threaded asynchronous I/O instead
of threaded blocking I/O is a huge win in terms of performance -
it would just be nice to have threading on top to do the number
crunching work.