I don't have much to write about this talk. Mainly, I liked it. It was very interesting and good look into what NodeJS can actually do. The first examples of a simple chat server that can use telnet was pretty awesome. If I had that when I took my network communications class in college, I would have been done in an hour!

All in all, he showed some interesting things. My main concern with NodeJS is that it is built on a C engine. If you want to plug any new libraries in, you will have to adapt them to NodeJS by writing a C binding that can be loaded in. In a world where I am moving away from C/C++ all the time, I don't necessarily appreciate the step back.

The really strange thing about the whole thing is when you think about network sockets and algorithm efficiency when dealing with JavaScript. Yes, it matters on the client side, but you are not talking about 100k+ tps throughput on a browser-run JavaScript application. These are the scales you consider on the server side, and NodeJS can perform. I'd just rather see it plug into existing frameworks a bit better.

Talking about scale, we were throwing everything we could at the servers that he brought up without much luck in bringing them down. There were some messy connection closes, and we had to ulimit some things, but it generally held up well. It was pretty impressive and a bit of a mind-bender when thinking that this was "running on JavaScript", which is honestly a bit of a misnomer.

All in all, it was a good talk. The next one is HTML5 performance. I'm looking forward to this as the HTML5 spec is starting to truly reach an adoption point.