Somehow I missed this announcement. It's really scary.

Node.js is built around Google's V8 implementation of JavaScript.

One of the concerns around Node is that Google might do something to break Node, or break a subset of Node apps. In a way Node apps are just as vulnerable to Google as JavaScript apps that run in Chrome.

And as we know Chrome is not a very stable platform for development.

Now we add another element to the mix, a whole other JavaScript interpreter, this one from Microsoft. Now, while there's a standard for JavaScript, big companies, esp Microsoft, are notorious for adding their own features to the standard, and sometimes even introducing bugs, so that you have to produce a special version of whatever you're doing for their version of the platform. This happened with browsers, and happened with Java, in the ugly competition between Microsoft and Sun Microsystems in the 1990s.

Google is no better. All big companies take shortcuts in their competition with other big companies.

Until now Node has been a pretty stable thing. You can move Node apps from one system to another without much concern about compatibility. Now all of a sudden, that's not true. If you're running on Microsoft's Node you might get a different result than running on some other Node.

Ugh.