If it seems strange to you that Node achieves parallelism by running only one piece of code at a time, that’s because it is. It’s an example of something I call a backwardism.
—Jim R. Wilson
Running JavaScript on a server is not a new concept — Netscape Enterprise Server offered this feature as long ago as 1994. There are currently a whole host of server-side implementations of JavaScript running on more than six different script engines. In addition to these pure JavaScript implementations, JavaScript can also be run within any platform that has a script host.
Although the JavaScript language ...