node-gyp

The benefit of having it in JS is not speed but portability and access to the JS ecosystem of tools. Having the code run in the browser without needing a complex setup is a huge benefit for sharing demos. Node.js provides a way to use native code as well and it's quite commonly used https://github.com/nodejs/node-gyp so there's no reason you couldn't use those same or similar libraries in a JS implementation.

I assume it's use of node-gyp, the native plugin system. https://github.com/nodejs/node-gyp

I nearly gave up on learning newer front-end JavaScript stuff like React & webpack and so on a few years ago because of spaces in paths. node-gyp doesn't like it when there's a space anywhere in your working path. Stuff I was messing around with was all in ~/Code Projects at the time, and using npm install on some things just broke. Looking back, I definitely could have done a better job parsing the error messages but still... There's an issue but it was closed in 2018 as "The workaround is to use a path without blanks" https://github.com/nodejs/node-gyp/issues/439

I would say no, not worth it if you rely on using your mac for developing software and don't want to spend two days getting everything to work again! I run 10.15 at work, and 10.14 at home, and so far, here are a couple of the issues I've run with 10.15. 1) Some weirdness around XCode and XCode Command Line Tools that made installing node-gyp a huge pain. I mean, look at these instructions and tell me if this is something you want to deal with: https://github.com/nodejs/node-gyp/blob/master/macOS_Catalin... 2) Change of default shell in 10.15 from bash to zsh. Kind of minor, but Apple doesn't want to use Bash 5.2 because of licensing. Great. 3) Lack of support for 32 bit programs. This is actually a big deal for me, since a course I am taking requires the use of WinBugs (I know, we should use STAN :) ), which is only available in 32 bi

> If so maybe the difference is that the posix/linux crowd is more likely to have installed a compiler at this point. The long running issue with Windows was that there weren't any compilers available (AFAIK) outside of installing Visual Studio first. When Visual Studio started offering free versions, the problem persisted: it's rather hard to justify downloading and installing a +4gb program just to make an dependency or extension to work (even if it wasn't directly required for the said dep). For example, this was a huge issue with node-gyp[1], which prompted Microsoft to release standalone Build Tools[2] to alleviate the problem. I think it's the same kind of issue with Python here, right? [1] https://github.com/nodejs/node-gyp/issues/629 [2] https://www.microsoft.com/en-us/download/details.aspx?id=499...

I do get that. I totally understand all OSes are very different. How often those differences surface really depends on a lot of things, mostly at what level of the OS you are working in. Node modules and apps tend to stay pretty high level. But again, I still stand by my original statement that Windows specific issues crop up more than any other OS. Just take a look at the README for node-gyp: https://github.com/nodejs/node-gyp -- yup in OSX you have to get Xcode and a few other OSX specific steps to arrive at gcc and make, but compare that to the Windows section ...

Speaking of Node, it still requires Python 2.7, right? Or at least node-gyp does: https://github.com/nodejs/node-gyp

Node.js 0.8 sounds great, though I'm afraid there will again be a long period where many of your NPM dependencies are simply broken, especially with the new build tool for native modules: https://github.com/TooTallNate/node-gyp We had a bit of a similar situation with the transition from 0.4 to 0.6 because of some API changes, especially the removal of EventEmitters from the C++ module API: https://groups.google.com/d/topic/nodejs/rmvA434u3Dk/discuss... Hopefully this time it will happen more smoothly.

request - https://github.com/mikeal/request jsontool - https://github.com/trentm/json mocha - https://github.com/visionmedia/mocha stream - http://nodejs.org/api/stream.html txn - https://github.com/iriscouch/txn follow - https://github.com/iriscouch/follow browserify - https://github.com/substack/node-browserify fleet - https://github.com/substack/fleet seaport - https://github.com/substack/seaport underscore - https://github.com/documentcloud/underscore node_redis - https://github.com/mranney/node_redis node-gyp - https://github.com/TooTallNate/node-gyp cookies - https://github.com/jed/cookies node-falafel - http://github.com/substack/node-falafel routes - https://github.com/aaronblohowiak/routes.js negotiator - https://github.com/federomero/negotiator marked - https://github.com/chjj/marked JSONStream - https://github.com/dominictarr/J