Why is node.js asynchronous?

Question

Nobody has actually asked this (from all the \'suggestions\' I\'m getting and also from searching before I asked here).

So why is node.js asynchronous?

From

Answer 1

Node.js runs on a single thread whilst scripting languages use multiple threads.

Not technically. Node.js uses several threads, but only one execution thread. The background threads are for dealing with IO to make all of the asynchronous goodness work. Dealing with threads efficiently is a royal pain, so the next best option is to run in an event loop so code can run while background threads are blocked on IO.

Asynchronous means stateless and that the connection is persistent whilst synchronous is the (almost) opposite.

Not necessarily. You can preserve state in an asynchronous system pretty easily. For example, in Javascript, you can use bind() to bind a this to a function, thereby preserving state explicitly when the function returns:

function State() {
    // make sure that whenever doStuff is called it maintains its state
    this.doStuff = this.doStuff.bind(this);
}
State.prototype.doStuff = function () {
};

Asynchronous means not waiting for an operation to finish, but registering a listener instead. This happens all the time in other languages, notably anything that needs to accept input from the user. For example, in a Java GUI, you don't block waiting for the user to press a button, but you register a listener with the GUI.

My second and last question related to this topic is this:

Could JavaScript be made into a synchronous language?

Technically, all languages are synchronous, even Javascript. However, Javascript works a lot better in an asynchronous design because it was designed to be single threaded.

Basically there are two types of programs:

• CPU bound- the only way to make it go faster is to get more CPU time
• IO bound- spends a lot of time waiting for data, so a faster processor won't matter

Video games, number crunchers and compilers are CPU bound, whereas web servers and GUIs are generally IO bound. Javascript is relatively slow (because of how complex it is), so it wouldn't be able to compete in a CPU bound scenario (trust me, I've written my fair share of CPU-bound Javascript).

Instead of coding in terms of classes and objects, Javascript lends itself to coding in terms of simple functions that can be strung together. This works very well in asynchronous design, because algorithms can be written to process data incrementally as it comes in. IO (especially network IO) is very slow, so there's quite a bit of time between packets of data.

Example

Let's suppose you have 1000 live connections, each delivering a packet every millisecond, and processing each packet takes 1 microsecond (very reasonable). Let's also assume each connection sends 5 packets.

In a single-threaded, synchronous application, each connection will be handled in series. The total time taken is (5*1 + 5*.001) * 1000 milliseconds, or ~5005 milliseconds.

In a single-threaded, asynchronous application, each connection will be handled in parallel. Since every packet takes 1 millisecond, and processing each packet takes .001 milliseconds, we can process every connection's packet between packets, so our formula becomes: 1000*.001 + 5*1 milliseconds, or ~6 milliseconds.

The traditional solution to this problem was to create more threads. This solved the IO problem, but then when the number of connections rose, so did the memory usage (threads cost lots of memory) and CPU usage (multiplexing 100 threads onto 1 core is harder than 1 thread on 1 core).

However, there are downsides. If your web application happens to also need to do some heavy number crunching, you're SOL because while you're crunching numbers, connections need to wait. Threading solves this because the OS can swap out your CPU-intensive task when data is ready for a thread waiting on IO. Also, node.js is bound to a single core, so you can't take advantage of your multi-core processor unless you spin up multiple instances and proxy requests.

Answer 2

Javascript does not compile into anything. It's "evaluated" at runtime, just like PHP & Ruby. Therefore it is a scripting language just like PHP/Ruby. (it's official name is actually ECMAScript).

The 'model' that Node adheres to is a bit different than PHP/Ruby. Node.js uses an 'event loop' (the single thread) that has the one goal of taking network requests and handling them very quickly, and if for any reason it encounters an operation that takes a while (API request, database query -- basically anything involving I.O. (input/output)) it passes that off to a background 'worker' thread and goes off to do something else while the worker thread waits for the long task to complete. When that happens the main 'event loop' will take the results and continue deal with them.

PHP/Ruby following a threading model. Essentially, for every incoming network request, the application server spins up an isloated thread or process to handle the request. This does not scale tremendously well and Node's approach is cited as one of its core strengths compared to this model.

Asynchronous means stateless and that the connection is persistent whilst synchronous is the (almost) opposite.

No. Synchronous instructions are completed in a natural order, from first to last. Asynchronous instructions mean that if a step in the flow of a program takes a relatively long time, the program will continue executing operations and simply return to this operation when complete.

Could JavaScript be made into a synchronous language?

Certain operations in JavaScript are synchronous. Others are asynchronous. For example:

Blocking operations:

for(var k = 0; k < 1; k = k - 1;){
  alert('this will quickly get annoying and the loop will block execution')
alert('this is blocked and will never happen because the above loop is infinite');

Asynchronous:

jQuery.get('/foo', function (result) { alert('This will occur 2nd, asynchronously'); });
alert('This will occur 1st. The above operation was skipped over and execution continued until the above operation completes.');

Answer 3

Could JavaScript be made into a synchronous language?

Javascript is not an "asynchronous language"; rather, node.js has a lot of asynchronous APIs. Asynchronous-ness is a property of the API and not the language. The ease with which functions can be created and passed around in javascript makes it convenient to pass callback functions, which is one way to handle control flow in an asynchronous API, but there's nothing inherently asynchronous about javascript. Javascript can easily support synchronous APIs.

Why is node.js asynchronous?

Node.js favors asynchronous APIs because it is single-threaded. This allows it to efficiently manage its own resources, but requires that long-running operations be non-blocking, and asynchronous APIs are a way to allow for control of flow with lots of non-blocking operations.