Don’t Try This at Home: Synchronous I/O in Node.js
summary
Explores concrete options for doing synchronous I/O in Node.js and what actually works: plain fs.readFileSync exists but only covers files; compiling C/Rust to WASI WebAssembly is synchronous but awkward; native add‑ons work but require reimplementing networking; workers + Atomics lets main thread block while a worker does async network I/O and is production‑ready but blocks the event loop and limits object access; embedding a separate Node instance (synchronous worker) is powerful but experimental and crash‑prone; mongosh currently uses Babel to transpile async to sync as a pragmatic workaround.
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chapters (4)
- 0:00Start
- 5:04So what do I actually work on
- 6:12Migrating from Spider Monkey to Node.js
- 17:40Sync I/O in Node.js: The chaotic neutral way
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