After some reading, I realized that things are the other way around - NodeJS was built, then the event loop was added to it because that was the only viable option for concurrency.
You need to research more. Here is Wikipedia for example:
Dahl criticized the limited possibilities of the most popular web server in 2009, Apache HTTP Server, to handle a lot of concurrent connections (up to 10,000 and more) and the most common way of creating code (sequential programming), when code either blocked the entire process or implied multiple execution stacks in the case of simultaneous connections.
Ryan wanted non blocking I/O thus he selected the language which had the event loop - the JavaScript.
See his talk when he complains about Ruby, great language but awful blocking runtime.
I'm a self-taught dev focused on websites and Python development.
My friends call me the "Data Genie".
When I get bored, I find tech to read about, write about and build things with.
My apologies. I am drawing on what I find and my knowledge is limited in this area. I can't find the reference now but the source I found talked about alternatives being instigated for event loop and then event loop selected.
Fair enough that Apache and Ruby handle things poorly in this regard. I saw something about the cost of maintaining many threads increasing at scale.
Though Apache is mostly replaced by Nginx and Ruby is in decline from what I heard.
Still, languages like C and Java that are known for their speed use multi-threading to be non-blocking rather than an event loop, and Exilir's multi threading scales amazingly from talking to an Elixir dev. So Event Loop may handle things differently in a single thread but I don't see how Event Loop is a necessity (I don't know of other languages that use it, certainly not before Node existed).
Also NodeJS may indeed handle the event loop well from the articles I see on the topic. It's just unfortunate that because of the DOM background that basing a runtime on JavaScript required an event loop rather than a choice between multi-threading or single threaded event loop.
I did years of multithreading (C, C#) before NodeJS (btw, NodeJS also has thread support).
The main problem with threads is switching between them. Each switch costs a lot of memory shifting and CPU cycles. Event loop is computationally cheap.
Hence, NodeJS is high performant in I/O heavy tasks (e.g. networking).
I'm a self-taught dev focused on websites and Python development.
My friends call me the "Data Genie".
When I get bored, I find tech to read about, write about and build things with.
Now I am curious why other languages don't do single threaded. or maybe it depends on the task and entire language setup. Or is it the difficulty of doing an event loop well that meant it took a long time for node to eventually be the first?
I'm a self-taught dev focused on websites and Python development.
My friends call me the "Data Genie".
When I get bored, I find tech to read about, write about and build things with.
Mate, this is plain wrong:
You need to research more. Here is Wikipedia for example:
en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Node.js
Ryan wanted non blocking I/O thus he selected the language which had the event loop - the JavaScript.
See his talk when he complains about Ruby, great language but awful blocking runtime.
My apologies. I am drawing on what I find and my knowledge is limited in this area. I can't find the reference now but the source I found talked about alternatives being instigated for event loop and then event loop selected.
Fair enough that Apache and Ruby handle things poorly in this regard. I saw something about the cost of maintaining many threads increasing at scale.
Though Apache is mostly replaced by Nginx and Ruby is in decline from what I heard.
Still, languages like C and Java that are known for their speed use multi-threading to be non-blocking rather than an event loop, and Exilir's multi threading scales amazingly from talking to an Elixir dev. So Event Loop may handle things differently in a single thread but I don't see how Event Loop is a necessity (I don't know of other languages that use it, certainly not before Node existed).
Also NodeJS may indeed handle the event loop well from the articles I see on the topic. It's just unfortunate that because of the DOM background that basing a runtime on JavaScript required an event loop rather than a choice between multi-threading or single threaded event loop.
I did years of multithreading (C, C#) before NodeJS (btw, NodeJS also has thread support).
The main problem with threads is switching between them. Each switch costs a lot of memory shifting and CPU cycles. Event loop is computationally cheap.
Hence, NodeJS is high performant in I/O heavy tasks (e.g. networking).
Ah okay thanks for explaining.
Now I am curious why other languages don't do single threaded. or maybe it depends on the task and entire language setup. Or is it the difficulty of doing an event loop well that meant it took a long time for node to eventually be the first?
Good questions. I wish I knew the answers.
Thanks for being open minded. You are a rare breed. 👍
I've updated my post to be more balanced and to point to your initial comment
Looks great! 👍👍👍