tangram VS FrameworkBenchmarks

Head over to https://www.tangram.dev and give it a try!

In this post, we will go over how we optimized our Gradient Boosted Decision Tree library. This is based on a talk that we gave at RustConf 2021: Writing the Fastest Gradient Boosted Decision Tree Library in Rust. The code is available on GitHub.

You can check out the Tangram Ruby Gem. We built it using Ruby FFI and the source is available on our GitHub repo.

We are using Rust for our web application and website at Tangram. You can view the source here: https://github.com/tangramdotdev/tangram/tree/main/crates/www. The website is at https://www.tangram.dev. We decided to write our own web framework because we needed server rendering and we wanted to use the builder pattern in creating components. Here is an example component for our Logo to get a sense of what this looks like: https://github.com/tangramdotdev/tangram/blob/main/crates/www/ui/logo.rs

Check out https://github.com/tangramdotdev/tangram.

Tangram | Senior Rust Programmer | Remote | https://www.tangram.dev

Tangram is an all in one machine learning framework designed for programmers. With Tangram, developers can train models and make predictions on the command line or with libraries for languages including Elixir, Go, JS, Python, Ruby, and Rust, and learn about their models and monitor them in production from a web application. To learn more about what the product does, watch the demo on the homepage at https://www.tangram.dev or check it out on GitHub at https://www.github.com/tangramdotdev/tangram.

We are looking to grow our engineering team with senior Rust programmers. We are currently based in Boston, MA but are looking to build a remote team. At Tangram, you'll get to work on everything from our core machine learning algorithms to writing front-end code in Rust! We are looking for developers with experience in Rust and familiarity with or willingness to learn machine learning concepts. If this sounds exciting, email me (Isabella, cofounder) at [email protected].

We chose to use Rust instead of TypeScript for the front end of https://github.com/tangramdotdev/tangram.

This allows us to:

* Share code with our server written in Rust.

I'm working on machine learning in Rust at Tangram. We currently only provide an implementation of linear models and gradient boosted decision trees but will move into exposing training of deep models in the future. You can check out Tangram here: https://github.com/tangramdotdev/tangram. You may also be interested in checking out Linfa https://github.com/rust-ml/linfa. If you're interested in the future of machine learning in Rust, check out Luca Palmieri's blog post: https://www.lpalmieri.com/posts/2019-12-01-taking-ml-to-production-with-rust-a-25x-speedup/

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.