status-desktop VS FrameworkBenchmarks

In the meantime, desktop already exists but it's just at the finish line w.r.t. good enough feature set and performance to launch broadly. Go check it out at https://github.com/status-im/status-desktop. This recent tweet also highlights some of the massive performance improvements the desktop team is focused on (which will also immediately be available to the mobile app): https://twitter.com/ethstatus/status/1662857323889524739

The application consists of the combined efforts of the Status organisation and community contributors, you can follow our development at github.com/status-im/ — you're welcome to contribute as well! If you're running into any bugs, we'd love it if you could file an issue in our mobile or desktop repositories.

For those looking for a no-censorship-ever-of-any-kind alternative, consider Status:

https://status.im/get/

If you don't need or want a crypto wallet or dapp browser, then simply don't use those parts of the app.

Relevant specs:

https://specs.status.im/

https://rfc.vac.dev/

Relevant repos:

https://github.com/status-im/status-react

https://github.com/status-im/status-desktop

There are trade-offs, for sure: since there's (deliberately) no integration with contacts lists (address books) of the OS or other apps, your social circle probably isn't using the app already, or in any case isn't discoverable.

The public chats facility has turned out to be too spam-prone for "well known" / advertised chats, e.g. #status. However, if you create a public chat that has some unguessable component (e.g. #myfriends-a9e72ab5) and you share it with friends (even lots) in a reasonably private context, then the chances of it being spammed are quite low. Note that public chats, while "public", are still E2EE, using the chat's name as the basis for a symmetric key.

1-to-1 and private group chats are highly secure; the latter have a max size, and depending on their size and your device, sending messages can be a little slow.

Creating a robust alternative to the existing public chats facility has involved a lot of work: the forthcoming Communities features provides a discord-like facility whereby founders/admins of communities can take advantage of various mechanisms for moderation and governing membership. The Communities feature can already be enabled in advanced preferences of both mobile and desktop apps, but note it's a WIP.

The moderation mechanisms for communities don't undermine the no-censorship principle of Status because:

(1) Any user can create a community.

(2) A community's rules are managed by those with a stake in the community, there's no override by Status-the-org nor anyone else.

(3) The underlying nodes of the network form a decentralized p2p network, i.e. there's no central actor/authority that controls the flow of messages.

Re: (3), running a Status node should be easy and incentivized.

The "incentivized" aspect is a challenging problem and not solved yet. Long story short, engineering an incentivized decentralized messaging network (not a blockchain!) is harder than incentivizing a blockchain network.

That being said, the "easy" aspect isn't too difficult to solve, sneak peek:

https://github.com/status-im/status-node

Finally, with pertinent laws and regulations in flux across the globe, there could come a day when binaries aren't readily available (from app stores, GitHub, etc.), but thankfully there's always `git clone` and `make`.

Disclosure: I'm a core contributor at Status.

My only big issue is that it does talk to googleusercontent.com. Not sure how that can fit with privacy. Heres the github issue.

Current numbers re: adoption were discussed in Status' most recent Town Hall: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=98wsQe6hHHs&t=365s

As for dev support: Status has teams of full-time devs working on various projects related to the mobile[1] and desktop[2] (beta) apps, as well projects that are related to the larger Ethereum ecosystem, e.g. nimbus-eth2[3]. Our teams aren't particularly large, but are working steadily to squash bugs and add/improve features. We also have teams dedicated to UX and design.

[1] https://github.com/status-im/status-react

[2] https://github.com/status-im/status-desktop

[3] https://github.com/status-im/nimbus-eth2

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.