It&#x27;s not just the implementation, though. The thing that differentiates Node from in-browser JS is something <i>like</i> a standard library—but really it&#x27;s something we don&#x27;t really have a term for in software architecture. It&#x27;s the fact that in-browser JS has a DOM to work with, while Node has processes and files and other Unixisms to work with. Effectively, Node and JS-in-browsers are two <i>sublanguages</i>, each exposing the distinct set of abstractions their underlying platforms provide.<p>This is distinct from the difference between, say, MRI Ruby and JRuby and IronRuby: those all fundamentally present the same (Unix) abstractions. The C, JVM, and CLR implementations of Ruby are effectively all composed of two parts: first, a shim on the underlying platform allowing it to be presented as <i>having</i> Unix platform abstractions; and then, a compiler&#x2F;interpreter written in terms of those Unix platform abstractions. Instead of IronRuby exposing, say, a Window with a thread-pool as the basic actor type, you still get Processes with Threads; instead of IronRuby exposing NT Objects with ACLs, you still get Files with read&#x2F;write&#x2F;execute masks.<p>Although this distinction is important, it&#x27;s usually pretty trivial. There just aren&#x27;t that many platform <i>abstractions</i> that existing languages really target, other than Unix, web browsers, and (rarely) SQL databases.<p>There are some rare exceptions that have their <i>own</i> set of platform abstractions: Smalltalk, MOO games, Erlang, Lua, and Microsoft&#x27;s Midori project, to name a few. This is why you don&#x27;t tend to see a language directly &quot;ported&quot; to or from any of these runtimes; it&#x27;d end up a different sublanguage, and indeed often an entirely new language. (One could argue that Elixir, for example, is what happens when you &quot;port&quot; Ruby to Erlang&#x27;s runtime; or that MoonScript is what happens when you &quot;port&quot; CoffeeScript to Lua&#x27;s runtime.)<p>Point being: I don&#x27;t know whether a list of fledgling <i>ports&#x2F;implementations</i> of languages would be all that interesting, where those ports&#x2F;implementations retain the original language&#x27;s platform abstractions. But I&#x27;d <i>love</i> to see a list of fledgling sublanguages that adapt an existing language to the platform abstractions of a new or different platform.