Is it hard? Always? If it is so hard then why is it around. How would you go about parallelizing even mildly CPU heavy work loads on node.js?
Node.js and the like are awesome, but only if you have no blocking calls and your CPU usage is tiny. Otherwise you get the performance of a single threaded server. You know, because that's what it is.
Yes multithread programming is difficult (for most people - like me). Hence the popularity of stuff like node.js, and also why people highlight Erlang's Actor model.
> How would you go about parallelizing even mildly CPU heavy work loads on node.js?
I'm not sure I understand your question, since (I believe) node.js has an event based concurrency model and not thread based (at least for its users).
Node.js and the like are awesome, but only if you have no blocking calls and your CPU usage is tiny. Otherwise you get the performance of a single threaded server. You know, because that's what it is.