IO.js – Evented I/O for V8 javascript

https://github.com/iojs/io.js

by owenwil • 12 years ago

174 47 12 years ago

github.com

Skywing2• 12 years ago

With what purpose? What's the significance of this? node is also node with many of the key contributors.

stormbrew• 12 years ago

40 minutes, 8 points, got to the front page, and... why? Is there a story behind this fork?

benatkin2• 12 years ago

There doesn't appear to be much of one, yet. The latest commit by indutny was just a commit to node that the owner of the iojs GitHub organization pushed to GitHub. There are no public members of the iojs organization. Even the name of the repo, "evented I/O for v8 javascript" is the same. All that's been introduced here is a new name, io.js.

denisw• 12 years ago

Looking at the v0.12 branches of both iojs/iojs and joyent/node, it doesn't seem to me that idutny's latest commit (updating OpenSSL to 1.0.1j) was a commit to Node proper. I also can't find that commit in any other branch of Node, or on idutny's personal copy of Node (idutny/node).

In fact, the history of Node and IO.js seem to completely diverge after Nov 21, with no overlap between the commits or contributors. To me, this seems to clearly indicate that the committors in these last IO.js commits are also the people behind that effort. Am I missing something?

cwmma• 12 years ago

from the issues that have been opened [1] and closed [2] it looks like indutny, jonathanong, and rvagg are involved, aka all people involved with node forward

1. https://github.com/iojs/io.js/issues/5 2. https://github.com/iojs/io.js/issues/7

randall• 12 years ago

Can someone tl;dr me the gist of everyone's beef with joyent? I've been hearing about a fork but haven't understood / seen why people feel like the fork is necessary.

shinko• 12 years ago

The same reason anyone forks: some core developers are not happy with the way development is headed.

The reasons are myriad, both technically and politically, and you probably won't understand them unless you engage. If they weren't, we wouldn't be seeing something as drastic as a fork.

jared314• 12 years ago

Joyent is accused of:

1. Fixating on platform stability over project evolution

2. Ignoring the community on project direction

3. Preserving public image over project committers

4. Being a total square

NOTE: I am against the fork.

girvo2• 12 years ago

1. Fixating on platform stability over project evolution

That's... hardly a bad thing, in my humble opinion. The other language I use at work, PHP, is a case-study in what happens when you "evolve" a project willy-nilly with little regard to platform stability. Nowadays, it's better, because the community has become more involved in the process, so I can see what #2 and #3 are Bad Things™ however.

doublerebel2• 12 years ago

Yes, the forkers are doing themselves a disservice. Joyent is accused of not communicating with the community, and yet the forkers respond by also not communicating with the community [EDIT: they have refused multiple opportunities to comment, Joyent is publicly appearing to make a consolation effort].

If Node wants to be taken seriously by a broader range of companies, it should be stable. There are forkers on the Joyent Node advisory board. As an open-source project, transparency will go a long way to gain community support from either side. So far, Joyent is winning the communication battle.

Recent article on the subject: http://readwrite.com/2014/11/13/node-js-joyent-possible-fork...

Arguably, this has been stewing for a while: http://venturebeat.com/2013/09/18/can-this-startup-steal-nod...

I am a huge node proponent, and don't encounter problems from outside the project. Joyent's articles and purpose have always been more clear to me than StrongLoop, which is why I use the services of the former. However I have a hard time believing these articles and rumors are the whole story, hopefully someone can chime in with more specific information.

drderidder• 12 years ago

This has been brewing for a year and a lot of people in the community felt it was inevitable [1]. Plenty of early node people were never keen on Joyent's grab in the first place.

The idea that the majority of core contribs are being uncommunicative is not really borne out by the growing community around node-forward and how open it actually is. They've set up live chat, a mentors list, help pages, given access to anybody who asks to the fork and are actively seeking input on new features like better numerical comp libs. It probably seems less communicative than it really is only because they want to wait till the concept is past nascent stage to announce anything. Totally not surprised that people have gotten fed up with Joyent and that forks are happening.

  1 https://groups.google.com/forum/#!topic/nodejs/mqSf47HhmyY

elisee2• 12 years ago

I don't have very specific details as I'm a bystander too but it seems Node has been stuck in 0.10.x land since early 2013 (http://blog.nodejs.org/2013/03/11/node-v0-10-0-stable/) while Node 0.12 and 1.0 releases were being talked about well over a year ago by former BDFL Isaac Schlueter (now at npm). Joyent, the current project stewards, have not been able to deliver a stable release in that time and don't share public plans / aren't communicating very much.

One of the many symptoms of that slow development process is that Node.js is basically running an unsupported version of V8 (https://twitter.com/jmayer/status/532971494695907328).

From what I've read, node-forward is/was only meant as a fork in the GitHub sense: they'd try to get their stuff merged back into node mainline. The GitHub fork has since been made private (https://github.com/node-forward/discussions/issues/7) and they're working to set up a proper governance model so that the community can truly be in charge. Joyent has reacted (I believe, it might have been in the works prior to node-forward) by proposing a node advisory board (https://github.com/joyent/nodejs-advisory-board) but it seems to be too little too late for at least some of the people behind node-forward (I've read what seem like irreconcilable disagreements about how it should be run).

I have no idea what (if anything) io.js is in relation to node-forward or if the same people are behind it. Can't find any announcements / endorsements on Twitter, so maybe it was just posted here before whoever is behind it were ready to go live.

scljstcwombat4• 12 years ago

Joyent, the current project stewards, have not been able to deliver a stable release in that time and don't share public plans / aren't communicating very much.

They probably don't want to publicly call out one of the core committers whose promised work is lagging. Or admit that the previous project lead was a poor choice who let it stagnate (but yet is inexplicably in the "Joyent did a bad job" camp). What good would that do anyone, apart from satisfy our boundless curiosity?

hayksaakian• 12 years ago

Can one of the 8 (so far) up-voters tell me whats interesting here?

The linked readme tells little.

-----

Now 25 pts with just as much explanation....

-----

As of 48 points, this (1) is the most relvant and informative explanation, but still has nothing to do directly with the linked OP.

(1) https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=8669743

elisee2• 12 years ago

Compare with https://github.com/joyent/node, similar readme and commit numbers. Looks like a node.js fork. (EDIT: maybe you already understood that, I thought it might have been a different thing from node.js altogether until I saw the repositories shared a README/history)

_almosnow• 12 years ago

With the few forks and stances that everyone is taking now, I really hope that an amazing project like Node doesn't get f* up by becoming fragmented and multiple different "versions" appearing.

Skywing2• 12 years ago

sigh time to start looking into Go

logicchains• 12 years ago

Or Dart. It's a lot closer to node and JS than Go (it uses asynchronous IO), and can more easily be used across both the server and client (Go's compilation-to-Javascript support is less developed). It's also surprisingly fast for a dynamic language, and has the generics Go lacks.

espadrine• 12 years ago

The most valuable piece that came out of the node project is libuv, and that is certainly not going away.

mappu2• 12 years ago

Node is the obvious leader amongst V8 shells, but there's also

- https://github.com/attractivechaos/k8 and discussion https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=7913950

- http://silkjs.net/

- https://code.google.com/p/teajs/

- https://github.com/samlecuyer/sorrow.js

- https://github.com/tlrobinson/narwhal

- d8 (bundled with v8 source)

Not counting other CommonJS-compatible platforms, or javascript shells using engines other than V8, or server-side javascript application frameworks

tjholowaychuk• 12 years ago

Wahoo, hope people are more open to change this time around – hope it works out!

thomasfromcdnjs• 12 years ago

From my Twitter feed...

"Looks like a Node.js fork called io.js is happening, with some of Node's key contributors. 😮 http://github.com/iojs/io.js "

https://twitter.com/devongovett/status/538131893682569216

scljstcwombat4• 12 years ago

It's raining node forks: https://github.com/io-forward/io-forward

throwaway90447• 12 years ago

Fork Yeah!

sreejithr• 12 years ago

10000+ commits and 574 contributors. Boy, this has to be good. Can somebody explain?

ykl• 12 years ago

It's a fork of node.js

jpincheira• 12 years ago

hey, catchy name, for some ms I thought of iOS... maybe it's just me doing too much iOS development in the last months.

misterdai2• 12 years ago

I'm finding the situation with Node.js quite frustrating. There doesn't appear to be much communication as to what's going on with the project.

It's also odd that the Node Advisory Board was supposed to meet on the 20th (2014-11-20). Chris Williams tweeted that it was about to start [1] but no minutes have appeared and I can't find any mention of what happened during the meeting.

[1] https://nodejs.org/advisory-board/2014-11-06/minutes.html#mi...)

voodootikigod• 12 years ago

Sorry for the delay, it takes a while to polish the minutes and then gain consensus from the rest of the group about the final minutes. The US Holiday didn't help much either (as well as finalizing RobotsConf, life, etc) They are here now: https://github.com/joyent/nodejs-advisory-board/blob/master/...

misterdai2• 12 years ago

Thanks Chris, probably read into the delay a little just because I could find any mention of the meeting actually taking place or not, apart from your tweet about it starting.

Understandable though with all the other stuff you've got going on. Cheers :)

kylequest• 12 years ago

If you are curious about node-forward vs io.js take a look at the end of this page http://nodeforward.org to see how they are related :-)

jackbravo• 12 years ago

@Mikeal has a couple of posts on the subject:

- https://medium.com/@mikeal/on-corporate-ownership-of-open-so... - https://medium.com/node-js-javascript/fragmentation-7e87d28f...

scljstcwombat4• 12 years ago

Ah yes, Mikeal, whose capability of double-think is so well-developed that he can claim to not understand what "fragmentation" means while at the same time advocating to do precisely that - https://github.com/iojs/io.js/issues/9

I swear Chris Dickinson is the only sane one in this whole mess. Possibly because he's new. Possibly because his employer is the only one involved that's not beholden to VC money and expectations of return.

almogK• 12 years ago

I think it comes down to politics, I feel its always better to have a company run and support an open source framework as long as their listen to the community and letting the community be a part of the framework.

elixir1• 12 years ago

As a dev do we continue to use node or change to the fork?

IO.js – Evented I/O for V8 javascript

Related Stories