Hi mjgs. I'm one of the book's authors, and we debated this quite a bit. The reasoning for using Python is written up here: https://browser.engineering/blog/why-python.html

That said, it's pretty easy to follow along in JS if you really want and in fact... Stay tuned, there'll be an update in this space very soon.

Thanks for the reply. I like that you’ve chosen a scripting language, it makes the book much more accessible. If it were in c / c++ / rust etc, I would never read it.

Thanks for sending the writeup of why you chose Python.

As for javascript readability issues, IMO those are non-issues and actually in some ways beneficial to have one language, no need to context switch.

The web workers issue is perhaps a problem, but maybe it makes the implementation easier, even if it doesn’t look much like real browsers?

I don’t understand the networking issue you highlight, you can build any networking functionality using NodeJS, it’s actually very good in networked application settings.

With so many people that write code online in javascript, the book would be so much more accessible. It would be a great compliment to the Python version or any C / C++ version.

I’m interested to hear your update, what’s the best way to get that automatically?

One other thing...this passed by in my feeds last week, I’m not an expert in web workers or browser threads etc, but it seems like it might be relevant, so sharing it just in case:

“A fast, efficient Node.js Worker Thread Pool implementation”

https://github.com/piscinajs/piscina