Using Alternative Runtimes

So far, you’ve seen what advantages and benefits the Node.js ecosystem offers to create great web applications. However, as with almost everything, there are a few downsides to the design decisions forming what we refer to as Node.js.

One of the biggest challenges in Node.js is the so-called dependency hell – where many small packages are put together to create a slightly larger package. Another challenge is that Node.js is not guarding any of these dependencies from accessing system resources. As such, importing anything from a third-party package may have unwanted side effects.

While ecosystem reliability and security can help us guard against dependency hell, improving performance is also an important strategy. Overall, the performance of Node.js can be regarded as decent; however, certain areas such as package resolution or processor core utilization could be improved by a fair share. Hence, performance is another area that could be...