retro-httpaf-bench VS assert-combinators

I do. The benchmark results itself is here: https://aws1.discourse-cdn.com/standard11/uploads/ocaml/opti.... This comes from the OCaml multicore monthly news, the october 2021 edition: https://discuss.ocaml.org/t/multicore-ocaml-october-2021/882.... The benchmark's repo is here: https://github.com/ocaml-multicore/retro-httpaf-bench. However that image is not the whole story, and there's a bit more info here: https://watch.ocaml.org/videos/watch/74ece0a8-380f-4e2a-bef5.... In that video, the author says that the result vary depending on the load (sometimes Rust Hyper can end up above OCaml httpaf eio), that OCaml currently uses an io-uring backend while Rust doesn't, and that the results are for single core as previous OCaml implementations are single-core themselves.

I do feel that this benchmark is incomplete. I'd like it to see the results while using all of the cores of a machine, and I'd like to see different type of loads. I do think that the results are impressive: performance between Go and Rust is great. I do hope that it stays this way with multicore.

We don't compare against Go pervasively. Benchmarking across languages is hard generally, but here is a result on a specific benchmark comparing several versions of OCaml benchmarks against Go and Rust on a Http server benchmark: https://github.com/ocaml-multicore/retro-httpaf-bench/pull/1....

If there are suggestions to make the Go and Rust versions, please feel free to tell us how in the issue tracker.

multicore already faster than Go

Multicore is coming along, you can read the latest news here: https://discuss.ocaml.org/t/multicore-ocaml-june-2021/8134

In terms of performance, there is this paper https://kcsrk.info/papers/system_effects_feb_18.pdf where on a single core async OCaml and effect OCaml are close to Go's net/http, and there is also this project https://github.com/ocaml-multicore/retro-httpaf-bench but I haven't see any results from it.

We use in prod variant of no 1. [0]. Why? Because:

* it's extremely lightweight (built on pure, functional combinators)

* it allows us to use more complex patterns ie. convention where every json field ends with Json which is automatically parsed; which, unlike datatype alone, allows us to create composable query to fetch arbitrarily nested graphs and promoting single [$] key ie. to return list of emails as `string[]` not `{ email: string }[]` with `select email as [$] from Users` etc.

* has convenience combinators for things like constructing where clauses from monodb like queries

* all usual queries like CRUD, exists etc. and some more complex ie. insertIgnore, merge1n etc has convenient api

We resort to runtime type assertions [1] which works well for this and all other i/o; runtime type assertions are necessary for cases when your running service is incorrectly attached to old or future remote schema (there are other protections against it but still happens).

[0] https://github.com/appliedblockchain/tsql

[1] https://github.com/appliedblockchain/assert-combinators

We use not so much frameworks but combination of lightweight libraries:

- runtime assertions [0] - to map unknown values at i/o boundary into statically typed code (rpc input parameters, sql results etc)

- template based sql combinators to sanitize sql/generate sql [1]

- jsonrpc over websockets - for bidirectional comms between f/e and b/e

[0] https://github.com/appliedblockchain/assert-combinators

[1] https://github.com/appliedblockchain/tsql

Types can be asserted at runtime (parsed) at IO boundaries (reading http request or response, websocket message, parsing json file etc). Once they enter statically type system they don't need to be asserted again.

The difference it makes is illusion of type-safety vs type-safety this article touches on.

You can try to bind service with client somehow but in many cases this will fail in production as you can't guarantee paired versioning, due to normal situations by design of your architecture or temporary mid-deployment state or other team doing something they were not suppose to do etc. It's hard to avoid runtime parsing in general.

Functional combinators [0] or faster [1] with predicate/assert semantics work very well with typescript, which is very pleasant language to work with.

[0] https://github.com/appliedblockchain/assert-combinators

[1] https://github.com/preludejs/refute

Once i/o boundaries are parsing unknown types into static types, your type safety is guaranteed.

[0] https://github.com/appliedblockchain/assert-combinators