rosettaboy VS FrameworkBenchmarks

As somebody who has written the same gameboy emulator in C++, Rust, and Zig (as well as C, Go, Nim, PHP, and Python) - I have yet to find a place where language affected emulation correctness.

Gameboy audio is kind of a pain in the ass (at least compared to CPU, which is fairly easy, and GPU, which is easy to get "good enough” if you don’t care about things like palette colours being swapped mid-scanline) - and some languages take more or less code to do the same thing (eg languages which allow one block of memory to be interpreted in several different ways concurrently will make the “interpret audio RAM as a bunch of registers” code much shorter with less copying) - but in my case at least, each one of my implementations actually has the same audio distortions, presumably because I’m misreading some part of the hardware spec :P

https://github.com/shish/rosettaboy/

(Also yes, the zig version is currently failing because every time I look at it the build system has had breaking changes...)

Niceness is subjective, but Nim is just as valid an addition to that group. Nim compiles to C and has had an --os=standalone mode for like 10 years from its git history, and as mentioned else-thread (https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=36506087) can be used for Linux kernel modules. Multiple people have written "stub OSes" in it (https://github.com/dom96/nimkernel & further along https://github.com/khaledh/axiom).

While it can use clang as a backend, Nim does not rely upon LLVM support like Zig or Rust (pre-gcc-rust working). Use on embedded devices is fairly popular: https://forum.nim-lang.org/search?q=embedded (or web search).

Latency-wise, for a time, video game programming was a perceived "adoption niche" or maybe "hook" for Nim and games often have stringent frame rendering deadlines. If you are interested in video games, you might appreciate https://github.com/shish/rosettaboy which covers all but Ada in your list with Nim being fastest (on one CPU/version/compiler/etc). Note, however, that cross-PL comparisons are often done by those with much "porting energy" but limited familiarity with any but a few of the PLs. A better way to view it is that "Nim responds well to optimization effort" (like C/Ada/C++/Rust/Zig).

https://github.com/shish/rosettaboy

The same gameboy emulator rewritten in C++, Go, Nim, PHP, Cython, Python, Rust, and Zig (and WIP typescript); mostly to teach myself the languages and to compare and contrast their idioms.

Also, when taken with a very large grain of salt, usable as a language benchmark (As with all benchmarks, there are lots of caveats - but as far as I’m aware this is unique in being “the same code in multiple languages” and “several thousand lines of code”):

  $ ./utils/bench.py

Looks very polished, but major disappointment that it's not showcasing OCaml as part of RosettaBoy (https://github.com/shish/rosettaboy)

I’m working on it :) https://github.com/shish/rosettaboy

(Ok it’s 5-10k lines rather than a million, but it’s non-trivial enough that the differences between languages are noticable)

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.