In the previous part of this series, we were discussing Map and Set, standard collections introduced in ES6. This time we will focus on JavaScript arrays.

Arrays, which are essentially list-like objects, are one of the core features of the language and every JavaScript developer has a solid experience in working with them. This blog post does not try to give you an understanding of the public API but instead aims to briefly go through various aspects of V8’s internal implementation of JS arrays that seem worthy to me: memory layout, size restrictions, and other interesting implementation details.

To keep…

Note: this post was originally published in Hazelcast blog.

As you may already know, the Hazelcast In-Memory Data Grid (IMDG) ecosystem includes a variety of clients for different languages and runtimes, which includes Node.js client library as a part of that list.

You can use Hazelcast clients in various cases, including, but not limited to the following:

• Building a multi-layer cache for your applications with IMap, a distributed, replicated key-value store, and its NearCache.
• Enabling pub-sub communication between application instances.
• Dealing with high load for views or likes events by using a conflict-free replicated counter.
• Preventing races when accessing 3rd-party…

The common wisdom says that K/V stores are a bad fit for time series (TS) data. Reasons are lots of writes and a large data volume implied by time series. But the common wisdom maybe sometimes wrong. Today we will discuss an approach for building a (relatively) efficient TS storage on top of RocksDB, an embedded key/value (K/V) store from Facebook. RocksDB is a perfect fit for our needs, as it’s production-ready, well-maintained, and provides solid write speed thanks to the LSM tree data structure. …

With this blog post, I am starting V8 Deep Dives series dedicated to my experiments and findings in V8, which is, no doubt, a well-engineered and sophisticated software. Hopefully, you will find this blog post valuable and share your ideas for the next topic.

Intro

ECMAScript 2015, also known as ES6, introduced many built-in collections, such as Map, Set, WeakMap, and WeakSet. They appeared to be an excellent addition to the standard JS library and got widely adopted in libraries, applications, and Node.js core. …

Node.js v13.10.0 introduced a built-in CLS API, namely, new class AsyncLocalStorage located in the well-known experimental async_hooks module. In this short post I’ll try to explain why it is so important.

CLS API 101

CLS stands for Continuation-Local Storage, an async variation of the Thread-Local Storage concept from the multithreaded world. CLS APIs allow you to associate and track contexts through asynchronous execution chains. Without such API, you have to either pass the context object explicitly (which sometimes is not an option), or deal with lots of monkey-patching for all async APIs in Node.js.

CLS APIs are often used in Application Performance Monitoring…

Everybody knows that Node.js is an open-source, cross-platform JavaScript runtime. Most of Node.js developers know that it’s built on top of V8, a JS engine, and libuv, a multi-platform C library that provides support for asynchronous I/O based on event loops. But only few developers can clearly explain how Node.js works internally and how it affects their code. That’s probably because many Node.js developers already know JavaScript before learning node. So, they often start learning node with Express.js, Sequelize, Mongoose, Socket.IO and other well-known libraries instead of investing their time in learning Node.js itself and its standard APIs. It seems…

Recently I wrote a post about request id tracing in Node.js apps. The proposed solution was built around cls-hooked library, which in its turn uses node’s built-in Async Hooks API. So, I decided to get more familiar with async hooks. In this post I’m going to share my findings and describe some real-world use cases for this API.

Let’s start our journey with a short intro.

An Intro to Async Hooks API

Async Hooks is an experimental API available in Node.js starting from v8.0.0. So, despite of being an experimental API, it exists for about a year and a half and seems to have no critical…

If you ever wrote back-end applications in Node.js, you know that tracing the same HTTP request through log entries is a problem. Usually your logs look something like this:

[07/Nov/2018:15:48:11 +0000] User sign-up: starting request validation[07/Nov/2018:15:48:11 +0000] User sign-up: starting request validation[07/Nov/2018:15:48:12 +0000] User sign-up: request validation success[07/Nov/2018:15:48:13 +0000] User sign-up: request validation failed. Reason:
...

Here, log entries are mixed up and there is no way to determine which of them belong to the same request. While you would probably prefer to see something like this:

[07/Nov/2018:15:48:11 +0000] [request-id:550e8400-e29b-41d4-a716-446655440000] User sign-up: starting request validation[07/Nov/2018:15:48:11 +0000]…