Node's single-threaded model

Taken in its entirety, the Node environment usefully demonstrates both the efficiency of multithreaded parallelism and an expressive syntax amenable to applications featuring high concurrency. Using Node does not constrain the developer, the developer's access to system resources, or the types of applications the developer might like to build.

Nevertheless, a surprising number of persistent criticisms of Node are based on this misunderstanding. As we'll see, the belief that Node is not multithreaded and is, therefore, slow, or not ready for prime time, simply misses the point. JavaScript is single-threaded; the Node stack is not. JavaScript represents the language used to coordinate the execution of several multithreaded C++ processes, even the bespoke C++ add-ons created by you, the developer. Node provides JavaScript, run through V8, primarily as a tool for modeling concurrency. That, additionally, one can write an entire application using just JavaScript is...