Ask HN: How many tech companies are using JavaScript for their whole stack?

7 points by desmondmcnamee 6 years ago | 2 comments

I’m currently building a mobile app and the entire stack is Javascript/Typescript. React-Native FE with a node backend. It’s nothing fancy just a simple API that sits in front of a Postgres DB. So far it’s going amazing. Since I’m constantly switching between BE and FE having them both in the same language saves my brain from a massive context switch.

I’m just wondering if it’s all too good to be true and I’ll eventually hit some bottleneck where the JS solutions doesn’t scale. Would love to hear what other people’s experiences are.

If you’re interested here’s a shameless plug of what I’m working on: https://hevyapp.com

yala86 6 years ago |

My company’s stack is a node.js API with a web app that’s a combination of next.js and a single page React app. Our scale isn’t massive either (~50k active users) but since the entire thing is written in Javascript it means all our engineers can work on all parts of the app. It’s kind of like how some airline companies only buy one type of plane so all their pilots can fly all their planes.

Haven’t experienced any “bottlenecks” but again we aren’t at huge scale or anything and we don’t have any heavy blocking computations where the single Javascript thread would be a problem.

desmondmcnamee 6 years ago | |

Cool yea we'll need a web app soon and i think going with Next.js and React will be a no brainer. I'm really interested in companies that do this at scale though. What's the downside? Why doesn't everyone do it?