actix-web VS .NET Runtime

Actix Web Documentation: Detailed documentation on using Actix-web, including examples and best practices for building web applications with Rust.

I can't speak to the "is it any good" part, but (after a bit of research) I can share what I've found. I'll try to represent things as best as I understand, but I may have some finer details mixed up.

ntex is written by the same person that started actix-web, Nikolay Kim (fafhrd91 on GitHub). There was a bunch of drama a while back due to actix-web using (what many reasoned to be) avoidable unsafe code, which was later found to be buggy. Nikolay was pilloried online, resulting in him transferring leadership of actix-web to someone else. ntex is, as I understand it, essentially Nikolay picking back up on his ideals for what could have been actix-web, if people hadn't pushed him out of his own project.

How ntex compares to the pre-/post-leadership change of actix-web, I don't know.

Here are some jumping points if you want more of the backstory.

https://www.theregister.com/2020/01/21/rust_actix_web_framew...

https://steveklabnik.com/writing/a-sad-day-for-rust

https://github.com/actix/actix-web/issues/1289

Are you ready to embark on another journey in Rust? Today, we'll explore how to create a REST API that performs basic mathematical operations: addition, multiplication, and division. We'll use Actix, a powerful web framework for Rust, together with Rhai, a lightweight scripting language, to achieve our goal.

Within actix-web, middleware is used as a medium for being able to add general functionality to a (set of) route(s) by taking the request before the handler function runs, carrying out some operations, running the actual handler function itself and then the middleware does additional processing (if required). By default, actix-web has several default middlewares that we can use, including logging, path normalisation, access external services and modifying application state (through the ServiceRequest type).

Rust is a popular system programming language, known for its robust memory safety features and exceptional performance. While Rust was originally a system programming language, its application has evolved. Now you can see Rust in different app platforms, mobile apps, and of course, in web apps — both in the frontend and backend, with frameworks like Rocket, Axum, and Actix making it even easier to build web applications with Rust.

actix to handle HTTP requests

It's an interesting "time is a circle" problem given that a century only has 100 years and then we loop around again. 2-digit years is convenient for people in many situations but they are very lossy, and horrible for machines.

It reminds me of this breaking change to .Net from last year.[1][2] Maybe AA just needs to update .Net which would pad them out until the 2050's when someone born in the 1950s would be having...exactly the same problem in the article. (It is configurable now so you could just keep pushing it each decade, until it wraps again).

Or they could use 4-digit years.

[1] https://github.com/dotnet/runtime/issues/75148

These can also be passed as arguments to `dotnet publish` if necessary.

Reference:

- https://learn.microsoft.com/en-us/dotnet/core/deploying/nati...

- https://github.com/dotnet/runtime/blob/main/src/coreclr/nati...

- https://github.com/dotnet/runtime/blob/5b4e770daa190ce69f402... (full list of recognized keys for IlcInstructionSet)

Yes, that is true. I'm not sure about JVM implementation details but the reason the comment says "virtual and interface" calls is to outline the difference. Virtual calls in .NET are sufficiently close[0] to virtual calls in C++. Interface calls, however, are coded differently[1].

Also you are correct - virtual calls are not terribly expensive, but they encroach on ever limited* CPU resources like indirect jump and load predictors and, as noted in parent comments, block inlining, which is highly undesirable for small and frequently called methods, particularly when they are in a loop.

* through great effort of our industry to take back whatever performance wins each generation brings with even more abstractions that fail to improve our productivity

[0] https://github.com/dotnet/coreclr/blob/4895a06c/src/vm/amd64...

[1] https://github.com/dotnet/runtime/blob/main/docs/design/core... (mind you, the text was initially written 18 ago, wow)

If you care about portable SIMD and performance, you may want to save yourself trouble and skip to C# instead, it also has an extensive guide to using it: https://github.com/dotnet/runtime/blob/69110bfdcf5590db1d32c...

CoreLib and many new libraries are using it heavily to match performance of manually intensified C++ code.

DEBUG: packageFiles with updates (repository=local) "config": { "nuget": [ { "deps": [ { "datasource": "nuget", "depType": "nuget", "depName": "Microsoft.Extensions.Hosting", "currentValue": "7.0.0", "updates": [ { "bucket": "non-major", "newVersion": "7.0.1", "newValue": "7.0.1", "releaseTimestamp": "2023-02-14T13:21:52.713Z", "newMajor": 7, "newMinor": 0, "updateType": "patch", "branchName": "renovate/dotnet-monorepo" }, { "bucket": "major", "newVersion": "8.0.0", "newValue": "8.0.0", "releaseTimestamp": "2023-11-14T13:23:17.653Z", "newMajor": 8, "newMinor": 0, "updateType": "major", "branchName": "renovate/major-dotnet-monorepo" } ], "packageName": "Microsoft.Extensions.Hosting", "versioning": "nuget", "warnings": [], "sourceUrl": "https://github.com/dotnet/runtime", "registryUrl": "https://api.nuget.org/v3/index.json", "homepage": "https://dot.net/", "currentVersion": "7.0.0", "isSingleVersion": true, "fixedVersion": "7.0.0" } ], "packageFile": "RenovateDemo.csproj" } ] }

https://github.com/dotnet/runtime/issues/59591

Support zstd Content-Encoding:

We might not be that far away already. There is this issue[1] on Github, where Microsoft and the community discuss some significant changes.

There is still a lot of questions unanswered, but initial tests look promising.

Ref: https://github.com/dotnet/runtime/issues/94620

https://github.com/dotnet/dotnet exists for source build that stitches together SDK, Roslyn, runtime and other dependencies. A lot of them can be built and used individually, which is what contributors usually do. For example, you can clone and build https://github.com/dotnet/runtime and use the produced artifacts to execute .NET assemblies or build .NET binaries.

Yeah, it kind of is. There are quite a few of experiments that are conducted to see if they show promise in the prototype form and then are taken further for proper integration if they do.

Unfortunately, object stack allocation was not one of them even though DOTNET_JitObjectStackAllocation configuration knob exists today, enabling it makes zero impact as it almost never kicks in. By the end of the experiment[0], it was concluded that before investing effort in this kind of feature becomes profitable given how a lot of C# code is written, there are many other lower hanging fruits.

To contrast this, in continuation to green threads experiment, a runtime handled tasks experiment[1] which moves async state machine handling from IL emitted by Roslyn to special-cased methods and then handling purely in runtime code has been a massive success and is now being worked on to be integrated in one of the future version of .NET (hopefully 10?)

[0] https://github.com/dotnet/runtime/issues/11192

[1] https://github.com/dotnet/runtimelab/blob/feature/async2-exp...