Node.js Architecture

Node is an open source toolkit for developing server side applications based on the V8 JavaScript engine. Like Node, V8 is written in C++ and is mostly known for being used in Google Chrome.

Node is part of the Server Side JavaScript environment and extend JavaScript API to offer usual server side functionalities. Node base API can be extended by using the CommonJS module system.

NodeJS is divided into two main components: the core and its modules. The core is built in C and C++. It combines Google’s V8 JavaScript engine with Node’s Libuv library and protocol bindings including sockets and HTTP.

V8 Runtime Environment

Google’s V8 engine is an open-source Just In Time, or JIT, compiler written in C++. In recent benchmarks, V8’s performance has surpassed other JavaScript interpreters including Spider Monkey and Nitro. It has additionally surpassed PHP, Ruby and Python performance. Due to Google’s approach, it is predicted that in fact it could become as fast as C. The engine compiles JavaScript directly into assembly code ready for execution by avoiding any intermediary representations like tokens and opcodes which are further interpreted. The runtime environment is itself divided into three majors components: a compiler, an optimizer and a garbage collector.

Libuv

The C++ Libuv library is responsible for Node’s asynchronous I/O operations and main event loop. It is composed of a fixed-size thread pool from which a thread is allocated for each I/O operation. By delegating these time-consuming operations to the Libuv module, the V8 engine and remainder of NodeJS is free to continue executing other requests. Before 2012, Node relied on two separate libraries, Libio and Libev, in order to provide asynchronous I/O and support the main event loop. However, Libev was only supported by Unix. In order to add Windows support, the Libio library was fashioned as an abstraction around Libev.