cache-manager VS FrameworkBenchmarks

If you've come from java and you like node, maybe you should spend some time with the alternatives?

A big part of it depends on what your exact requirements are but my experience with node didn't bite me for quite a while.

1/2) my experience is that even the supported packages have had glaring holes where they don't in other languages. Just to give a quick example, I had a project that used node-cache-manager to implement a tiered cache. There was a bug (in the cache library with the most stars) just last year where the cached values in a memory cache were passed by reference as opposed to copied. That meant any mutation on them affected other fetches from the cache! That would never happen in java. This particular bug took weeks to debug in production because values were being randomly mutated. After the fix, it also had different behaviour for when the cache value was new vs when it was retrieved. So two mutation bugs in the same cache codebase see https://github.com/BryanDonovan/node-cache-manager/issues/13....

I'm not blaming the author, he's a really good guy. What i'm saying is this is a wart both in the language and the library ecosystem - it's not unreasonable to expect a sensible caching library.

3) I agree that threads aren't necessarily the way to go. But can we agree that a language that CAN efficiently take advantage of multiple cores would be better? It's not just for your application. It's also for any compiling eg. typescript!

> Just check out the recent GitHub report where they were accidentally leaking information from other users into their sessions.

Concurrency is hard! except in a language where it isn't. In elixir each "thread" (erlang process) would get a different copy of the data so this type of bug doesn't happen.

4.

> Typescript (combined with autogenerating typescript type files from GraphQL schema definitions) has been honestly heaven for us, and the benefits I've seen with the structural-based typing of TS made me realize the huge number of times I had to battle the nominal-based typing of Java and the immense pain that caused.

That is an interesting assessment. I've never really noticed a difference in practice between structural/nominal type systems to the extent that i didn't realise typescript was structural. Normally if you have multiple classes implementing the same structure, you want an interface anyway to make sure they don't diverge i.e. there is a higher purpose for them being the same.

Would you have an example of how this would be a deal breaker?

I think besides this aspect, Kotlin might be up your alley.

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.