14 DAY TRIAL // As of version 0.6.0, Node.js now runs natively on Windows, in addition to Linux, and developers can already access the official executable they can use, as well as the documentation necessary to simplify their work.
Node.js creator Ryan Dahl revealed that in order to introduce support for Microsoft’s platform, his team needed to revamp a great deal of the core architecture of the offering.
For those not familiar with the technology, Node is officially defined as an “event-driven I/O server-side JavaScript environment based on V8.”
It’s designed to better support connection concurrency and boost the scalability of network programs because it does away with the less efficient thread-allocation model. And now, developers using Windows can also leverage Node.js.
“This comes some four months after our June 23rd announcement that Microsoft was working with Joyent to port Node.js to Windows. Since then we’ve been heads down writing code,” revealed Claudio Caldato, principal program manager, Interoperability Strategy Team.
“And, while we were busy making the core Node.js runtime run on Windows, the Azure team was working on iisnode to enable Node.js to be hosted in IIS.“
Caldato stressed that performance will not be an issue for those devs that use Node on Windows, rather than on Linux.
Dahl also makes it clear that even with a reworked core architecture, Node does not suffer from performance degradation while running on UNIX systems.
He also points out that Node performance on Windows is comparable to that on Linux, although there’s still room for improvement.
“We consider this a good intermediate stage for the Windows port. There is still work to be done. For example, we are not yet providing users with a blessed path for building addon modules in MS Visual Studio. Work will continue in later releases,” Dahl notes.
Node.js v0.6.0 for Windows is available for download here.