aiosql VS FrameworkBenchmarks

> resort to raw SQL

I'm the opposite, I would rather write SQL than "resorting to" ORM queries, which is why my favourite libraries are aiosql[1] in Python, Hugsql[2] in Clojure and similar: write the queries as SQL in .sql files, which then get exposed as functions to your code.

[1] https://nackjicholson.github.io/aiosql/

[2] https://www.hugsql.org/

I prefer to use aiosql https://nackjicholson.github.io/aiosql/ to organize my SQL and have it in a SQL folder. It looks like this where colons specify variables:

I tend to do a lot of data-heavy projects, so I tend to eschew ORM-style code and use a project called aiosql to bind raw SQL to python methods, and offload as much expensive computation to the DB as possible. If I'm prototyping an endpoint (e.g. calculating percentiles for some midsized time-series data), and just need a non-performant working placeholder, it's extremely easy to dump a SQL table to pandas and yeet something together in a few lines - then smoothly replace it with a more performant SQL query down the road. Highly contextual move, but I find it to be an awesome balancing point between flexibility, scalability, performance, productivity, etc.

As one of the rare Python developers who actually like SQL, my favourite database library is aiosql

Only slightly off-topic, poking around in there led me to aiosql, which takes an idea I'd had and jumps forward a good long way. :-)

I've been doing something in this vein for a big personal project, using this python library: https://nackjicholson.github.io/aiosql/.

In short, I'm using a run of the mill stack (Caddy/Gunicorn/Flask/Postgres) - but with the twist that all my core logic is defined in plaintext SQL files, which get bound into namespaced Python methods by aiosql. Routing, error handling, templating, etc. are all done in Python - but all data manipulation and processing are outsourced to the DB level. All database object definitions are laid out in a massive, idempotent "init_db" method that gets called at launch, so I can essentially point the app at a fresh instance of Postgres and rebuild from scratch. The design is primarily driven by my personal distaste for ORMs, but I've found it extremely beneficial in terms of rigid typing, integrity checks, and performance.

Definitely check out https://nackjicholson.github.io/aiosql/ if you want to stick with SQL

I took that approach on my latest Flask project and it’s gone quite swimmingly. The problem I ran into was that a lot of the ecosystem, and therefore documentation, blog posts, helper libraries, etc., are all written under the assumption that you’re using an ORM. It took a while to figure out how to work around that, but once I did, I was home clear.

I also used a helper library to automatically map namespaced .sql files onto python functions with various return types, which made the development process way more elegant: https://nackjicholson.github.io/aiosql/. Absolute game changer if you plan to go this route - can’t recommend it highly enough.

I've been using FastAPI for some time, and now I'm using it as a full web framework (not just for REST APIs). I like writing SQL without ORMs, so the combination of aiosql[0] + FastAPI + Jinja2 works great. Add HTMX[1] and even interactive websites become easy.

That's in fact the stack I am using to build https://drwn.io/ and I couldn't enjoy it more.

Thanks Sebastián for creating it!

[0] https://github.com/nackjicholson/aiosql

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.