Why is node.js unstable? [closed]

Question

Today is 9/17/2011. As of today, what are the biggest reasons why Node.js is unstable, or not ready to use for everyone as a public facing server by itself.

A few things that I've come up with are:

• Apps will shut down if unhandled exceptions occur
• Libraries are still young and change a lot

Right now I plan on creating an e-commerce site using Node.js, Mongoose, Express, and forever -- and I need some solid reasons to consider so that I can be prepared for whatever comes along. I'd also like to look into how easy it would be to hack, but I'm not too concerned about that yet because it seems like it's quite improbable if I follow standard practices like sanitizing inputs.

Why is node.js unstable?

Answer 1

There are a few

• node.js does not work stably on windows
• node.js is simply not as tried and tested as say, nginx.
• the core API hasn't frozen yet (although it's unlikely to change).

The reasons you mentioned are falicies.

Apps will shut down if unhandled exceptions occur

Yes of course they do. Unhandled exceptions (remember that exceptions are exceptional) crash and burn the server. This is why in production we have strong guards against this. We use clusters of nodes that restart any instances of your application if one crashes.

Libraries are still young and change a lot

Not really. Most of the libraries out there that are stable are indeed stable. There are plenty of libraries which carefully warn you that they are in development / unstable / not production-ready. The only difference is that in the open source community you get exposed to a lot more libraries that aren't ready. Where as in closed source communities you only see libraries when they are ready.

Honestly though 0.4.x is stable on linux and I would use it. I'd still probably also use node.js as a load balancer in front of other node's rather then use nginx but that might be considered risky.