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.
Jason Hoffman (Chief Scientist, Founder at Joyent) has posted some good questions to me, based on my original nodejs and V8 post. Let me summarise Jason’s questions and comments.
I have been saying for a while that server-side Javascript matters. We, at Yahoo!, see a bright future in server-side Javascript and are making a big investment in it. But if you follow me on twitter, you’ll know that I am also looking into ensuring high-availability of server-side Javascript-based services on production. Which really comes down to something like: to V8 or not to V8.
I just installed OpenJDK 7 on Ubuntu 10.04 LTS under VirtualBox (one core, 256 MB). I wanted to run a quick test to see how the new JDK7 Async channel APIs were performing in comparison with node. A simple test of a hello world running on a single core shows that the JVM truly has what it takes to be the best runtime for network servers. Most notably, compare the distribution of response times, especially at 99%. The advantage the JVM is showing might be enough to comfortably fit Rhino onto it.