Reading the above quote in a blog post about CommonJS/JSGI: The Emerging JavaScript Application Platform peeked my interest. What were they talking about? Digging around I found this really interesting talk by Ryan Dahl on event-loop concurrency.
The approach resonates with me for two reasons. One, as a Java developer I’ve seen a lot of improvements related to concurrency in the last few years. Yet fundamentally concurrency remains a significant issue. It’s neither simple to make programs safe, not is it simple to test for such conditions. Two, I once worked on a high-performing trading application that was built from the start as an event-driven system where services did not return values but posted messages on an internal message bus.
It’s interesting that JavaScript, which is now building up server-side support can approach concurrency differently.