just-js/community

Andrew Johnston

@billywhizz

@antonkatz yes, it sounds like if it is just standard javascript and uses little or none of the node.js libraries then it should work fine. anything that's using the standard out of the box JS like algorithms and data structures that would be common across browsers/node.js should be easy to "port". having said that, it is not going to be any faster or better on just as it's not using any of the node.js standard library.... if you want to send me a link to the code feel free and i can take a look.

for the env var above you would just do "just.env().NODE_ENV"

Anton

@antonkatz

@billywhizz interesting, so if I'm not using any of node.js standard lib, switching to just makes no difference.

that makes sense given that in this case it's just V8 that's doing all the work, and both node and just use the same V8

So the main use case for just would be servers and IoT?

Andrew Johnston

@billywhizz

@antonkatz they would be good use cases. i'm not sure i could speculate too strongly on what it would be good or bad for. if it gains some traction i would hope people would find all sorts of uses for it i could never even imagine. the main benefits it brings to the table i think are simplicity and access to lower level fundamentals that are not available or difficult to get at on other JS and higher level language platforms.

and when i say simplicity i am talking about it in this sense: https://www.infoq.com/presentations/Simple-Made-Easy/. the runtime is simple. anyone with some basic knowledge of JS and C/C++ could look at the codebase and figure out very quickly what is actually going on. it has hardly any dependencies beyond the linux kernel and v8. imho, the problem with a lot of frameworks and platforms is they provide layers and layers of complex abstractions on top of what is actually happening at the system level. this leads to developer confusion, poor mental models and an inability to detect and diagnose production issues when they happen. this is a much bigger waste of time and resources than having to write a little more code or think a little longer up front the way i see it.

Anton

@antonkatz

I guess, I shouldn't say good or bad use cases. Rather, what are the original use cases for the early adopters of just? I'm not going to start writing enterprise software with just yet because I'm limited for libraries that I can use. However, if I have very specific needs, eg. serving a website with limited functionality then I'll go for it.
I would love to see a future for this project. Have you thought about "selling" it (free or not) to businesses?

PPS. I don't think it's a good use of time to create a node like interface, but would it be possible to execute certain pieces of code in node and get back the result in just?

eg. const res = node("./node-dependant-module").run("hello", "world")

Andrew Johnston

@billywhizz

all things are possible @antonkatz! ;)

i have been putting together a "useful" web framework which might be along the lines of what you are looking for. the goal with this is to put a more "realistic" entry in the techempower benchmarks, iron out any bugs/issues i find along the way and hopefully in next day or two i can share that and get some feedback on it.

right now, i have found it useful myself for writing small applications that do a specific thing and need low level access to system apis and good performance. things like packet filters, encryption/compression utilites etc. i have got a basic shell working inside a vm with js as the init process and no dependency on any other system applications. i've also got various libraries in various states of disrepair for postgres/sqlite/ffi/rocksdb/openssl and others.

Andrew Johnston

@billywhizz

re. interfacing with nodejs, it would be possible to do all sorts of integration and emulation of various core node.js apis and would be delighted if at some point people wanted to try experimenting with that.

Andrew Johnston

@billywhizz

i've been sidetracked by the issues above but will hopefully have some proper docs and tutorials out in next number of days. i have a lot of bits to pull together. sorry for delays.

Anton

@antonkatz

@billywhizz you're doing awesome work, single-handedly, no sorry needed!!!!

frank-dspeed

@frank-dspeed:matrix.org

[m]

@billywhizz: Thanks for the good API Examples for v8 and the Benchmarks i was aware that libuv slows down NodeJS i saw that via heatmaps and Also the GraalVM Demo of ES4X Showed that. But your Research results are awsome i will expand on that i just started fixing the libv8 builds so that they are less redundant and clean. I am Also working on some General Patterns and Documenting them.

Out of my view this solves a big usecase (Micro services) as this enables to Produce JS v8 Isolates. I was Working with GraalVM and DENO to reduce the needed layers but i was by far not as successfull as you,

If you need anything or got any plans feel free to msg me until then. Thanks for all that great Examples.

Andrew Johnston

@billywhizz

@frank-dspeed:matrix.org : thanks for the comments. am definitely interested in hearing what you would find it useful for. i'm hopeful i can get back to coding on it some more in next few weeks but free to chat/discuss online if you have any questions/ideas. i'll keep an eye on here over next few days.

extremety1989

@extremety1989

hey is this comunity alive ?

Andrew Johnston

@billywhizz

it is but it's very small and i keep forgetting to check gitter!

Ian King

@viskogurl

Hello! I was just wondering if there was any update on the documentation or the "useful" web framework that you referred to. I've been checking the github repo frequently but I haven't seen anything yet so I just figured I would ask here :) Looking forward to trying it out!

extremety1989

@extremety1989

@viskogurl you should check github for updates etc. !

Andrew Johnston

@billywhizz

@viskogurl if the pace of development is not to your liking you are free to build your own "useful" frameworks on top of what is already there. the one i am working on will not be part of core and will be an external third party module. there's nothing stopping you doing the same. this is a system-level framework, not another batteries included all singing all dancing mess like node.js. you're welcome.

Ian King

@viskogurl

@billywhizz Okay, thanks. To be clear, I wasn't meaning the framework you built was unuseful. I was referring to your previous message where you stated 'i have been putting together a "useful" web framework' so I was just looking for an update since this community isn't very active and the last update I could find on github was from February. Thanks for the info.

Andrew Johnston

@billywhizz

i'm sorry if i was a little short - i read it the wrong way and thanks for clarifying. if you want to check out the in-progress latest you should be able to with the recent 0.1.1 release. the updated techempower project is using the new code which has a "useful" api. still working on this but not too far away having something stable and fast now. https://github.com/just-js/techempower/blob/main/techempower.js. justify and pg libs are now much more streamlined and hopefully easier to use. at moment i am trying to clean up codebase and write some docs.

once i get over this hump it should hopefully be easier to get other people involved if interest is there and plan out some kind of roadmap to a 1.0 release.

Ian King

@viskogurl

It's no problem! I didn't structure my message very well so that was my fault.

Awesome! I've been extremely excited to try it out so thank you for sharing the techempower.js server file and the justify library. The Justify syntax should be a breeze to learn for anyone coming from Express so I'm hoping JustJs will start attracting some of that crowd soon :)

Do you have any plans to add MacOS or Windows support? I know almost all the servers in the world run on Linux but I just thought it might be easier to get more people on the JustJs train if it was easier for developers to jump right in without having to configure WSL on Windows or a VM on MacOS. I'm currently a little busy right not but I would gladly help implementing it sometime soon if that's something you'd be interested in down the road.

Ian King

@viskogurl

busy right now*

Andrew Johnston

@billywhizz

@viskogurl no plans for cross platform at the moment. maybe once it gets to a nice stable release on linux/x86_64 can start looking at what would be possible in terms of porting to other platforms. happy to help with any effort others want to make down this road but probably best until api/features etc. have stabilised first. porting to linux on arm/i386/risc-v shouldn't be very difficult. porting to BSD/MacOS should be a little more difficult but not too daunting (although i have little experience of this myself) imho. windows support i would imagine will involve a lot of work.

one thing i would like to avoid is what the codebase for most cross-platform projects looks like - full of macros and #ifdefs which imho gets in way of understanding and reasoning about the code. so there's a tradeoff there that i am happy to discuss but don't want to take any firm decisions on yet.

Andrew Johnston

@billywhizz

as a server side/system utility platform (which is what i see it as currently) i think linux on x86_64 is a good starting point for deployment. for development, is possible to seamlessly run docker in vscode (https://code.visualstudio.com/docs/remote/containers) and use browser based ide's like gitpod if folks are on mac/windows machines.

if anybody is interested in taking a look at macOS portability i am happy to be involved as i do realise that is a desktop/laptop platform a lot of backend devs like. but i don't have much experience with BSD/macOS api's so would have to do a lot of catching up which i just don't have time for right now.

Ian King

@viskogurl

Ahh I see. Would it be better to just create a branch for MacOS and Windows support so there aren't all the macros and #ifdefs when the time comes?

I totally agree that Linux is the best option for a production app. I'm currently on MacOS but I'm not very good with Docker so I'll see what I can do about adding a development environment for Mac. What exactly about JustJs is strictly Linux? Is it only because it uses epoll instead of kqueue for the event loop?

Sorry for all the questions. I can just do some more digging in the source code if you don't currently have the time to respond :)

Andrew Johnston

@billywhizz

no, questions are welcome as long as you don't mind some delay in me seeing them as i don't check here very often - maybe a google group would be best thing to create?

or there are github discussions now too

re. linux - all the c code and system api's are linux specific at moment. there are lots of constants defined which are linux specific. it's an area i need to do some more research in and tbh cross-platform not a big priority for me right now. one of main goals is codebase should be easy for someone with some basic C/C++ knowledge and a vague understanding of linux system apis.

i have spent a lot of years working on node.js projects and digging into problems/bugs/weird behaviour is very difficult because of the layers and layers of complexity in the codebase. a lot of that complexity imho comes from the desire to be all things to everyone. that's fine - node.js is really good at being that, but it comes at a cost.

Andrew Johnston

@billywhizz

i love javascript and i love the linux system apis and i think the combination of those two in a very simple, easy to understand and reason about framework is something a lot of people might found useful, especially when you consider most server software these days is deployed on linux whether it is virtualised or not. i don't see that changing a lot in years ahead - if anything, it will become more the norm.

the big issue, as you point out, is ease of development when most devs are on either macOS or windows as their main machines. i use ubuntu myself but i'm not under any illusions that linux on the desktop is going to become the norm anytime soon, if ever.

so, open to suggestions discussion around this while being quite firm i don't want to "waste time" worrying about cross platform too much until i get close to a 1.0 stable release of the system that has a reasonable standard library on linux.

Andrew Johnston

@billywhizz

having said all of the above i don't think making this work on other platforms would be an enormous effort as the codebase is quite small. but probably best to wait for that until we get a nice stable api and then can have a look at that and make better decisions on what would need to change in order to allow it to be ported more easily.

i've created a github discussions (github is taking over the world!) here: https://github.com/just-js/just/discussions/

Andrew Johnston

@billywhizz

in terms of roadmap, i am currently on verge of finishing up work on postgres driver and justify web framework and pushing out a nice new demo for the techempower benchmarks - am currently hopeful it will see a little bump in the rankings. should be done with that in next week or so. then i have 3-4 weeks of very painful and slow documentation/test writing and cleanup work. once that's done would be happy to get some other folks involved and draw up/agree a roadmap for a 1.0 release in ~6 months. once we get to 1.0 i don't see the core system changing hugely and there will then be some scope to look at things like cross platform, dependency management and better library support - possibly even some kind of node.js compatibility layer but the goal is not to become another node.js and be good at everything. from where i am standing, it's to be a viable option for writing high performance system level software on linux in javascript. we can see from techempower results what is possible and hopefully now we will see it is even possible with a nice clean simple-to-use api too. :)

Andrew Johnston

@billywhizz

@viskogurl i have some experiments here: https://github.com/billywhizz/just-apps/. one thing i have been contemplating (and yes, it is kinda crazy and am not sure what it would be useful for yet) is you could build a complete javascript "OS/distro" on top of linux kernel which is JS all the way down. i did a little experiment here: https://github.com/billywhizz/just-apps/tree/main/kvm. init is written in JS and the shell is JS. standard programs are provided by busybox which is controlled by JS, but it would be possible to implement all the core stdlib stuff in busybox too, or as much as needed for something useful. if you could add chromium to this (which shouldn't be massively difficult) you would have a whole distro which is just javascript, html and css and no dependencies other than the linux kernel.

i'll see if i can put a demo of this up soon so you could see it in action. it is quite nice to be able to run a terminal and switch seamlessly between standard shell apps and js.

Ian King

@viskogurl

Ahh okay! I've been thinking a lot about what you said before how Docker might work best for people on Mac and Windows. I understand now how you would essentially be reinventing the wheel trying to rewrite the code base to support Mac and Windows when Docker is already cross-platform compatible. I totally see why you don't want to spend time on cross-platform compatibility when there are bigger fish to fry such as getting close to a stable release. I'm on Mac though so I'm gonna go ahead and start working on an "Install Wizard" for Mac and Windows because I'm extremely excited to try Just out :) It will be using Docker as you suggested which will make it super simple to upgrade versions as development continues.

I love javascript as well but Node's (and Deno's) poor performance breaks my heart lol. I feel like javascript deserves better so that's why I'm so excited about Just. I can't wait to see the results of the Techempower demo! The current performance benchmarks are already mind-boggling so congrats on such an amazing accomplishment :)

That would be awesome to have a Node.js compatibility layer. Even if Node's performance is pitiful, there's still so many useful libraries and frameworks that are built on top of it. I know a lot of developers would really appreciate being able to salvage code that they've already written and "port" it to Just.

A complete javascript "OS/distro" would be absolutely sick...😱If anyone asks you why you would build such a distro, tell them "Just(js) because". I'll stop being punny now lol. On a serious not, I'm super excited to see the demo! Just the fact that an entire distro could run on javascript would be super impressive.

(I'll start messaging on the Github discussions page from now on)

dmorganb

@dmorganb

That JavaScript OS/distro idea sounds mind-blowing!

1 reply

I think things like https://tessel.io could benefit from just too. Awesome stuff 😎

Air9420

@Air9420

If it can run on arm, I want to use it on Raspberry Pi 4B😂

1 reply

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