I attended a tech talk last week on node.js by Ryah Dahl. The video of the talk is up on YouTube.
Node.js Overall Structure
The JavaScript implementation in node.js is Google's V8. As mentioned in an earlier article, V8 compiles the source JavaScript directly to machine code the first time it is executed. There is no intermediate bytecode format and no JS interpreter. In addition to V8, node.js relies on libev for its event loop, libeio for asynchronous I/O, and c-ares for asynchronous DNS support. Like everything else in the known universe, it relies on OpenSSL for cryptography and SSL/TLS support.
A standard library in JavaScript is supplied. This provides access to the underlying C++ implementation, and also has helpful bits like a URL parser and a REPL shell for easy experimentation. One thing it does not provide is the DOM. Node.js is not a browser, there is no HTML document to interact with.
Node.js Implementation
Entry points to the C++ code appear as a JavaScript variable named process. For example, here is an excerpt from dns.js:
var dns = process.binding('cares');
'cares' refers to the c-ares DNS support library. The dns variable allows JavaScript code to make calls to c-areas.
// Easy DNS A/AAAA look up
exports.lookup = function (domain, callback) {
Notice the signature of the function: input arguments and a callback when finished. There are never blocking operations in node, everything which might not complete immediately is a callback.
var addressType = dns.isIP(domain);
if (addressType) {
process.nextTick(function () {
callback(null, domain, addressType);
});
dns.isIP() calls into C++ code, which makes a series of inet_pton(AF_INET*) calls to figure out if the argument is a valid numeric IP address. I've omitted the C++ code here, we dive into a more interesting example below.
} else {
if (/\w\.local\.?$/.test(domain) ) {
// ANNOYING: In the case of mDNS domains use NSS in the thread pool.
// I wish c-ares had better support.
process.binding('net').getaddrinfo(domain, 4, function (err, domains4) {
callback(err, domains4[0], 4);
});
Node.js has two ways to implement support routines in C++. If the C++ code is structured to be asynchronous with a callback, it can be launched from the main thread using libev. Node.js makes heavy use of async I/O for this reason. Blocking C++ calls are handled by a pool of worker threads, which send an event to the main when their operation completes. In this code snippet the 'local' domain is handled by the thread pool as a special case, because c-ares doesn't handle mDNS.
We'll come back to the thread pool code path later, after examining the common case.
} else {
channel.getHostByName(domain, dns.AF_INET, function (err, domains4) {
if (domains4 && domains4.length) {
callback(null, domains4[0], 4);
} else {
channel.getHostByName(domain, dns.AF_INET6, function (err, domains6) {
if (domains6 && domains6.length) {
callback(null, domains6[0], 6);
} else {
callback(err, []);
}
});
}
});
... etc ...
"channel" is a JavaScript variable which links to a context in the c-ares library. The JS code to create channel is omitted for brevity. Now we'll peel back one layer to look at the C++ implementation.
HandleChannel::GetHostByName(const Arguments& args) { HandleScope scope; Channel *c = ObjectWrap::Unwrap (args.Holder()); assert(c); if (!args[0]->IsString()) { return ThrowException(Exception::Error( String::New("First argument must be a name"))); } if (!args[1]->IsInt32()) { return ThrowException(Exception::Error( String::New("Second argument must be a family"))); } if (!args[2]->IsFunction()) { return ThrowException(Exception::Error( String::New("Third argument must be a callback"))); } int family = args[1]->Int32Value(); if (family != AF_INET6 && family != AF_INET) { return ThrowException(Exception::Error( String::New("Unsupported address family"))); }
Argument unwrapping and validity checks when traversing the interface from one programming language are always tedious. You can never predict when someone will copy the channel.getHostByName invocation out of the standard library and mess with it, and you'd like the framework to do something sane no matter what they do.
String::Utf8Value name(args[0]->ToString()); ares_gethostbyname(c->channel, *name, family, HostByNameCb, cb_persist(args[2])); return Undefined(); }
Thats it. ares_gethostbyname() is in the C-ARES library, which we won't delve into here. HostByNameCb is the C++ callback function when resolution is done. HostByNameCb injects an event to the JavaScript code, to call the callback function passed in to the original call.
The JavaScript has an alternate code path for mDNS requests, using the getaddrinfo() method on process.binding('net'). Most of that code path consists of the same sort of argument unwrapping and checking as GetHostByName, which we will omit. The mDNS code path uses a blocking DNS request, serviced by the thread pool. The code to send work to the pool and arrange a callback later is pleasingly simple:
eio_custom(Resolve, EIO_PRI_DEFAULT, AfterResolve, rreq);
Resolve is the function the worker thread is supposed to call. AfterResolve is the callback function in the main loop which the worker thread should trigger when done.
Final Thoughts
Node.js makes it easy to develop high performance applications by not offering APIs which would drastically lower performance. Everything is a callback, there are no blocking calls in the API (except for initialization calls such as module loading). Where the underlying C++ implementation is also based on callbacks, this is straightforward. Where the underlying C++ code would block, the implementation becomes a somewhat more difficult exercise in thread management.
The JavaScript API in node.js "feels" very much like JavaScript. I believe a main factor making this possible is the relatively small number of entry points required from the JavaScript down into the C++ code: sockets, DNS resolution, the http parsing library, etc. It was feasible for each interface to be lovingly crafted by hand, baking JavaScriptiness into the API.
Attempting this technique for software like GUIs, where the number of C/C++ APIs to bind to is enormous, would likely require a more automated linkage between JavaScript and C++. This is the world of things like SWIG to generate interfaces or libffi to make direct calls. SWIG and libffiare extremely useful in their niches, but definitely have the feel of a foreign intruder in the host language. I don't know that a node.js for GUIs would be as pleasant a thing to look upon, but we need a way to do so. Software needs to advance without having to continually reinvent and reimplement what has come before, and without requiring drastic amounts of manual effort.