libev VS libuv

Also, libev

It's done even now. See ev.h where they do this. Just that you disable GCC's aliasing warning. There's a reason why restrict and aliasing became important to deal with. It wasn't standards that killed it.

[11] node io: https://github.com/libuv/libuv

In terms of requests you talk about libuv is C++ https://libuv.org which is build-in to node and can be used in Go as well. So there is literally no reason to compare them on a this basis.

There are just enough differences between musl and glibc to be confusing, e.g. https://github.com/libuv/libuv/issues/2225

I just upgraded to Win10 a few months ago, mostly because libuv maintainers are pricks and once they broke it, every dependent software (which is "almost everything") suddenly didn't support Win7 either.

Node.js is using a C library called libuv to implement the Event Loop. I think every developer should also know about it and have a basic understanding about this difference to avoid some mistakes in future.

Having said that, know that MoarVM is using the libuv library for its IO needs. And my understanding is that its IO is asynchronous.

If you want real non-blocking IO, the C standard library doesn't support this and the OS-specific APIs tend to be difficult to use (and non-portable), so I would recommend something like libuv.

My biggest pointer would be to remember that Java & JavaScript aren't named that way by coincidence. They're two different approaches to a similar problem. Java suffers from Enterprise Development (eg: Enterprise FizzBuzz[0]), JavaScript suffers from Ultimate Accessibility (eg: how many questions on Stack Overflow conflated jQuery and JS?).

> How should exceptions be managed? [...] Has there been a debate about best practice? Where can I find it?

I suggest you handle the errors you can and otherwise let it crash.[1][2] Debates in NodeJS-land have steered towards more monadic/Result-like structures and working synchronous-looking try/catch onto async/await. NodeJS and its various components are open source, you'll have a lot of luck looking around on GH for issues & PRs related to a feature -- same for the language, ECMAScript[3] officially.[4]

Since you mentioned Clojure, have you looked at ClojureScript?[5] That may be a good entry to JS authors & articles you'd enjoy.

> I have the impression that NodeJS is a bit more magical than the JVM [...] Is that correct? Where are good resources on this subject?

As other replies have mentioned, you're really talking about V8[6] for the "JSVM" executing that code. A thing I've seen throw some people for a loop is how minimalist the specification actually is.[7] The magic in NodeJS is certainly from V8 and the rate of optimizations there but also libuv,[8] what actually powers the infamous event loop.

Hope that helps!

[0]: https://github.com/EnterpriseQualityCoding/FizzBuzzEnterpris...

[1]: Borrowing from Erlang, see Making reliable distributed systems in the presence of software errors, Joe Armstrong, page 104 "Error Handling Philosophy" https://erlang.org/download/armstrong_thesis_2003.pdf

[2]: _Most_ kinds of errors will cause the process to crash if you don't handle them, https://nodejs.org/dist/latest-v16.x/docs/api/errors.html . Promise rejections don't (yet) though it emits an error, and callback-based APIs will always consist of an [error, data] tuple for the arguments

[3]: https://github.com/tc39/proposals

[4]: Because Oracle owns the trademark, of course: http://tarr.uspto.gov/servlet/tarr?regser=serial&entry=

[5]: https://clojurescript.org/

[6]: https://v8.dev/docs

[7]: "ECMAScript as defined here is not intended to be computationally self-sufficient; indeed, there are no provisions in this specification for input of external data or output of computed results. Instead, it is expected that the computational environment of an ECMAScript program will provide not only the objects and other facilities described in this specification but also certain environment-specific objects, whose description and behaviour are beyond the scope of this specification except to indicate that they may provide certain properties that can be accessed and certain functions that can be called from an ECMAScript program." https://tc39.es/ecma262/#sec-overview

[8]: https://github.com/libuv/libuv

Node uses Libuv as the event loop implementation. To use a Node asynchronous API, you pass a callback function as an argument to that API function, and during the event loop, your callback is executed.