Ahead with Node.JS and Google V8

September 11, 2011

It has been 10 months since I posted about Google V8. But somebody re-started a thread again on Hacker News about my old blog post. So now I am compelled to briefly say where we are at.

We have continued and extended our investment in Node.JS. I can tell you that what the teams are doing is transformative and pure awesomeness. Unfortunately this is as much as I can tell you right now, but really soon you’ll start hearing what we’ve done. In every single demo, internal and external, we have done of the technology, the feedback has been fantastic. I am very happy and fortunate to have a team of super-stars working on this.

As per my concern on being locked into Google V8 and not being able to support the software, things have changed since I last blogged. First, Google has been very, very, supportive addressing V8 bugs whenever they existed.

Secondly, here at Yahoo! we donated some code to the fine folks at Mozilla to wrap the Spidermonkey API with the V8 API. Mozilla went on to create a full implementation of Node.JS on Spidermonkay and provide the architectural re-assurance we needed. I am still surprised however from the discussion on the blogosphere and twitterspace months ago about how many developers don’t seem to pay attention to open source governance. When you have the responsibility for a multi-million dollar technology investment, you want to make sure you cover all your bases.

Finally, we have partnered closely with the fine folks at Joyent and are working through the final stages of negotiation for how we’ll work together going forward.

Let me say that I am really excited about what the technology innovation that Node.JS is bringing to the industry, whether that is to create a new generation of I/O intensive servers, or to bring Javascript to the server-side. I see Node.JS’ future is bright.


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