So, what JavaScript framework for making console application would you recommend to a beginner, Duktape or NodeJS? I am almost certain Duktape is better for most projects.
To add a little context, yesterday, I finally managed to get my compiler to usefully run in NodeJS (maybe it will come more useful to somebody that way, you can download a NodeJS-compatible version here). I managed to make it work in Duktape years ago.
NodeJS has a much steeper learning curve. Whereas Duktape makes it easy to combine JavaScript with C or C++ (much more well-known languages among beginner programmers), NodeJS basically forces you to make everything in JavaScript, even things which are not at all obvious how to do in JavaScript. In my opinion, that is a significant drawback.
Furthermore, Duktape is significantly more portable. It's trivial to make it work on less-used platforms, such as FreeDOS: as long as there is a reasonably modern C compiler targeting that platform, you can run Duktape there easily. For NodeJS, while there are binaries for commonly used platforms, for something like 32-bit Linux you already need to go through the hassle of compiling it from source. And that's significantly harder than compiling Duktape from source.
The advantages of NodeJS is that it supports more modern JavaScript and is faster than Duktape (Duktape is an interpreter, NodeJS is a JIT-compiler), but I don't think that has any value if you can't get your code to run in the first place (as I wasn't able to do for over a year).
To add a little context, yesterday, I finally managed to get my compiler to usefully run in NodeJS (maybe it will come more useful to somebody that way, you can download a NodeJS-compatible version here). I managed to make it work in Duktape years ago.
NodeJS has a much steeper learning curve. Whereas Duktape makes it easy to combine JavaScript with C or C++ (much more well-known languages among beginner programmers), NodeJS basically forces you to make everything in JavaScript, even things which are not at all obvious how to do in JavaScript. In my opinion, that is a significant drawback.
Furthermore, Duktape is significantly more portable. It's trivial to make it work on less-used platforms, such as FreeDOS: as long as there is a reasonably modern C compiler targeting that platform, you can run Duktape there easily. For NodeJS, while there are binaries for commonly used platforms, for something like 32-bit Linux you already need to go through the hassle of compiling it from source. And that's significantly harder than compiling Duktape from source.
The advantages of NodeJS is that it supports more modern JavaScript and is faster than Duktape (Duktape is an interpreter, NodeJS is a JIT-compiler), but I don't think that has any value if you can't get your code to run in the first place (as I wasn't able to do for over a year).
