FrameworkBenchmarks VS Graal

Neat. Thanks for sharing!

Interestingly, may-minihttp is faring very well in the TechEmpower benchmark [1], for whatever those benchmarks are worth. The code is also surprisingly straightforward [2].

[1] https://www.techempower.com/benchmarks/

[2] https://github.com/TechEmpower/FrameworkBenchmarks/blob/mast...

ntex was formed after a schism in actix-web and Rust safety/unsafety, with ntex allowing more unsafe code for better performance.

ntex is at the top of the TechEmpower benchmarks, although those benchmarks are not apples-to-apples since each uses its own tricks: https://www.techempower.com/benchmarks/#hw=ph&test=fortune&s...

Ruby is slow. Very slow. How much you may ask? https://www.techempower.com/benchmarks/#hw=ph&test=fortune&s... fastest Ruby entry is at 272th place. Sure, top entries tend to have questionable benchmark-golfing implementations, but it gives you a good primer on the overhead imposed by Ruby.

It is also not early 00s anymore, when you pick an interpreted language, you are not getting "better productivity and tooling". In fact, most interpreted languages lag behind other major languages significantly in the form of JS/TS, Python and Ruby suffering from different woes when it comes to package management and publishing. I would say only TS/JS manages to stand apart with being tolerable, and Python sometimes too by a virtue of its popularity and the amount of information out there whenever you need to troubleshoot.

If you liked Go but felt it being a too verbose to your liking, give .NET a try. I am advocating for it here on HN mostly for fun but it is, in fact, highly underappreciated, considered unsexy and boring while it's anything but after a complete change of trajectory in the last 3-5 years. It is actually the* stack people secretly want but simply don't know about because it is bundled together with Java in the public perception.

*productive CLI tooling, high performance, works well in a really wide range of workloads from low to high level, by far the best ORM across all languages and back-end framework that is easier to work with than Node.JS while consuming 0.1x resources

Although that seems to have improved in recent years.

https://www.techempower.com/benchmarks/#hw=ph&test=json§...

RoR and whatever C++ based web backend there is count as a valid comparison in my book. But comparing the languages itself is maybe a bit off.

On a side note, you can actually compare their performance here if you’re really curious. But take it with a grain of salt since these are synthetic benchmarks.

https://www.techempower.com/benchmarks

Most benchmarks you'll find essentially have someone's thumb on the scale (intentionally or unintentionally). Most people won't know the different languages well enough to create comparable implementations and if you let different people create the implementations, cheating happens. The TechEmpower benchmarks aren't bad, but many implementations put their thumb on the scale (https://www.techempower.com/benchmarks). For example, a lot of the Go implementations avoid the GC by pre-allocating/reusing structs or allocate arrays knowing how big they need to be in advance (despite that being against the rules). At some point, it becomes "how many features have you turned off." Some Go http routers (like fasthttp and those built off it like Atreugo and Fiber) aren't actually correct and a lot of people in the Go community discourage their use, but they certainly top the benchmarks. Gin and Echo are usually the ones that are well-respected in the Go community.

There is certainly a lot of speculation in Techempower benchmarks and top entries can utilize questionable techniques like simply writing a byte array literal to output stream instead of constructing a response, or (in the past) DB query coalescing to work around inherent limitations of the DB in case of Fortunes or DB quries.

And yet, the fastest Ruby entry is at 274th place while Rails is at 427th.

https://www.techempower.com/benchmarks/#hw=ph&test=fortune&s...

oh what machine? with how many workers? doing what?

search for "node" on this page: https://www.techempower.com/benchmarks/#section=data-r21

JustJS would like a word https://www.techempower.com/benchmarks/#section=data-r20&tes...

In terms of RPS, this web service is more-or-less the fortunes benchmark in the techempower benchmarks, once the data hits the cache: https://www.techempower.com/benchmarks/#section=data-r21

Or, at least, they would be after applying optimizations to them.

In short, both of these would serve more rps than you will likely ever need on even the lowest end virtual machines. The underlying API provider will probably cut you off from querying them before you run out of RPS.

Contrary to what vocal Kotlin advocates might believe, Kotlin only matters on Android, and that is thanks to Google pushing it no matter what.

https://spectrum.ieee.org/the-top-programming-languages-2023

https://snyk.io/reports/jvm-ecosystem-report-2021/

And even so, they had to conceed Android and Kotlin on their own, without the Java ecosystem aren't really much useful, thus ART is now updatable via Play Store, and currently supports OpenJDK 17 LTS on Android 12 and later devices.

As for your question regarding numbers, mostly Java 74.6%, C++ 13.7%, on the OpenJDK, other JVM implementations differ, e.g. GraalVM is mostly Java 91.8%, C 3.6%.

https://github.com/openjdk/jdk

https://github.com/oracle/graal

Two examples from many others, https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_Java_virtual_machines

Pkl was built using the GraalVM Truffle framework. So it supports runtime compilation using Futurama Projections. We have been working with Apple on this for a while, and I am quite happy that we can finally read the sources!

https://github.com/oracle/graal/tree/master/truffle

Disclaimer: graalvm dev here.

That's pretty interesting. It's not as aggressive as Bee sounds, but the Espresso JVM is somewhat similar in concept. It's a full blown JVM written in Java with all the mod cons, which can either be compiled ahead of time down to memory-efficient native code giving something similar to a JVM written in C++, or run itself as a Java application on top of another JVM. In the latter mode it obviously doesn't achieve top-tier performance, but the advantage is you can easily hack on it using all the regular Java tools, including hotswapping using the debugger.

When run like this, the bytecode interpreter, runtime system and JIT compiler are all regular Java that can be debugged, edited, explored in the IDE, recompiled quickly and so on. Only the GC is provided by the host system. If you compile it to native code, the GC is also written in Java (with some special conventions to allow for convenient direct memory access).

What's most interesting is that Espresso isn't a direct translation of what a classical C++ VM would look like. It's built on the Truffle framework, so the code is extremely high level compared to traditional VM code. Details like how exactly transitions between the interpreter/compiled code happen, how you communicate pointer maps to the GC and so on are all abstracted away. You don't even have to invoke the JIT compiler manually, that's done for you too. The only code Espresso really needs is that which defines the semantics of the Java bytecode language and associated tools like the JDWP debugger protocol.

https://github.com/oracle/graal/tree/master/espresso

This design makes it easy to experiment with new VM features that would be too difficult or expensive to implement otherwise. For example it implements full hotswap capability that lets you arbitrarily redefine code and data on the fly. Espresso can also fully self-host recursively without limit, meaning you can achieve something like what's described in the paper by running Espresso on top of Espresso.

I'm also using GraalVM if that's of any help.

Quarkus is one of Java frameworks for microservices development and cloud-native deployment. It is developed as container-first stack and working with GraalVM and HotSpot virtual machines (VM).

Apologies, I didn't mean to imply DCEVM went poof, just that I was sad it didn't make it into OpenJDK so one need not do JDK silliness between the production one and the "debugging one" since my experience is that's an absolutely stellar way to produce Heisenbugs

And I'll be straight: Graal scares me 'cause Oracle but I just checked and it looks to the casual observer that it's straight-up GPLv2 now so maybe my fears need revisiting: https://github.com/oracle/graal/blob/vm-23.1.0/LICENSE

> to be compiled to a single executable is a strength that Java does not have

I think this is very outdated claim: https://www.graalvm.org/

https://github.com/oracle/graal/issues/7182