Vertx in Java is basically the fastest across all the benchmarks, putting it in the same speed/productivity bucket as node doesn’t make much sense...

I was talking about the compromise, if node is slower it provides better productivity.

Why would a experienced java dev be less productive than a node js one?

Tooling, typing, boilerplate and contrasting to the library that is npm.

Vertx is polyglot, you can use js and npm if you like, so in this respect vertx can be more productive as it allows you too use the tool that works best for your problem, be it npm, maven, gradle or language: java, javascript, kotlin, etc...

Most companies that sell embedded hardware managed remotely by Web interfaces.

Honest question: What sort of embedded hardware deals with millions of requests a second? I wouldn't have thought that kind of utility was the same domain as "embedded" (in the stricter sense of the term).

Granted you could expand the term to cover hardware load balancers and the sort, but those wouldn't really be running websites so much as routing and caching them. Aside from that, you have management interfaces for embedded devices but they're typically used infrequently and only by a small subset of users. Plus a surprising number of them are just written in PHP or Perl.

But maybe there is a whole industry out there I've overlooked? You've got me curious.

It is not millions of requests a second, rather what you can put into something with 512 KB or less while providing a minimal Web management interface.

For example,

https://www.hcc-embedded.com/embedded-systems-software-produ...

Ahh yes. I do have some familiarity with HCC - albeit limited to a hobby project rather than anything professional. It's interesting stuff but I'd argue that's a completely different target industry to the ones that would use any of the web frameworks in the discussed referenced benchmark. So not really on point to the question raised by the GP with regards to C vs the more rapid development frameworks like node.

Not that I'm trying to dismiss your point either because if I was given a choice between node and C, I might personally choose C just because of my own personal prejudices against Javascript. :D

I don't have actual experience with HCC, it was just one random example.

Embedded is one of my interests, so I do keep an eye on news about what is going on.

On my case I would rather try to bend my answer to be either C++ with embedded STL or Pascal, failing that C as well, in spite of my prejudices against it.

Hopefully they would at least allow C99. :)

I love Pascal (C++ less so but we all have our own personal preferences) however if you're targeting the web then you're definitely better off with C#, Java or Go* . You'd get similar language constructs while having a much richer ecosystem to develop in. Which was the point the GP was making with regards to development time verses request throughput. Only with the aforementioned you at least don't sacrifice that much in performance compared with node.

* I know Go gets a lot of hate because of its lack of generics and choice of error handling, but it's worth remembering that for web development you don't run into those particularly annoyances much.