Mniot posted:

We use Node at my office. It's pretty great for little start-up companies where you only have one developer and you need a back-end and a front-end and why switch context when you can just live in JS all the time? The V8 engine is pretty spectacular, so you can get a lot of mileage out of this setup. You're often doing most of the work on the front-end, and the back-end is just a layer on the database.

We've been hitting some Node walls lately, because it's not a good general-purpose back-end choice. There's a much higher number of heavily-used libraries that are dumb than I'm used to. Logging kills it (yes, logging kills all back-ends, but Node goes down faster and with fewer users than anything else). Callbacks are great when the chain is short (take a request, hit a DB, hit another web service, reply to the request), but once you have 10 operations to perform, it's hell. If you have 10 operations to perform and you're not doing callbacks, then you're hosed because it's single-threaded.

It's easy to write code, and I'd definitely use Node for prototyping. Beyond that, though, I feel like you either run into trouble or you have to become such a deep expert at the V8 engine and the C libraries that you lose the whole "any dumb programmer can do it" point of Node.