Re:Old box, dumb code, few thousand connections, no big deal
by pjmlp on Friday May 08, 2020 @08:30AM
(#23114054)
And other people don't get it is possible to have high level languages and almost C like performance.
You don't need to give up on JIT and AOT compilation to use high level languages, and this is where current tooling for Ruby and Python ends up losing.
Re:Old box, dumb code, few thousand connections, no big deal
by Doxin on Monday May 11, 2020 @04:26AM
(#23140000)
Fair enough, I've been playing with D a lot lately, which is basically "what if python was a C dialect instead". It's an incredibly simple language to learn but it's no less easy to write in than python. For most things I still reach for python though, probably because I've grown comfortable with duck typing.
side-note when starting with D: make sure to install dub. it's the package manager and basically eliminates makefiles from the compilation process. Just "dub init" and "dub run" and you're off to the races.
My first commercial use of Ruby was in 2005. Not web facing, but messaging middleware. As in a pub-sub type passing of messages between various endpoints.
We had a C version. It was about 7k lines to support the bare minimum we needed. As an experiment to teach myself Ruby I wrote a Ruby implementation. With the usual caveats (it's often easy to make a rewrite better in all kinds of ways, including size), it was ~700 lines, far easier to read, and supported far more functionality, so I put it in production.
Was it slower? As usual that depends what you mean by "slower". It consumed 10x more CPU, but it also did much more work (e.g. supporting more flexible routing of messages etc.). The throughput, however was the same, and 10x more CPU means that maxing out the network connection took 10% of a single core instead of 1% of a single core.
For some types of tasks CPU is the most important thing, but for a lot of tasks you'll be IO limited. And for a lot of tasks that people think are CPU limited are really down to poor IO handling (causing excessive context switches e.g. through lots of small reads is a common one)