Item — HN Reader

So I guess I'm gonna be that guy.

According to http://www.techempower.com/benchmarks/, the 2nd position is held by a Java framework, losing only 13,5% to the C++ overall winner. Granted, you need a 3rd party library to have something similar like goroutines / fibers / actor concurrency / whatever, but its all there if you want it.

2 comments

Java is not regarded as convenient for web development. Fast when built, yes, but not convenient. And C++ is borderline unsuitable. (A well-chosen and carefully used subset, sure, but the exact things that Rust is fixing about C++ is also why you should think about a dozen times before using it to build web apps.)

And neither are as safe as Rust is/will be with multithreading. Doing really pervasive concurrency is possible, but not particularly easy with those languages.

Will Rust really be that much more "convenient" than Java with all its tooling, libraries stack overflow examples etc? It seems to me it would be in the same class as Java at best when it comes to convenience with the likes of python and ruby being in a different class.

This is 100% speculation, but in a few years, I can see Rust as a language in which _those who code in it_ find it to be way more convenient, but those who don't find it more difficult.

Basically, the borrow checker double checks your work. As you get better at not screwing up, it'll become less and less of an issue. When you're just starting out, it can seem way harder, because you're not used to having those restrictions checked.

Why isnt java convenient for web development? too many semicolons?

So... Scala, then?

"Yes, I've probably heard of your obscure fast-as-C language that has a great web stack... to a first approximation, nobody else has."

It's less obscure than Rust and among web developers less than Go as well. How is it obscure, really?

http://www.indeed.com/jobtrends?q=scala%2C+rust%2C+Clojure%2...

That's nonsense. Scala is pretty well known. (Apache Spark, Play Framework, Spray, Akka, Scalding, Kafka, etc...)

As for the web stack: Play, Scalatra, Spray, etc... It can also use the fairly mature Java libs as well: Jersey, Jetty, etc...

On the other hand, I don't know of any popular projects that are written in Rust, other than what Mozilla is doing with Servo.

I can name companies as well: Twitter, Airbnb, LinkedIn, Gilt, Foursquare, The Guardian, etc...

Github still probably runs mostly on Ruby as well, and for performance, you could use JRuby.

Scala is far from obscure

The benchmark page is interactive, you should check out all tabs and come to a conclusion.

Some of the top contenders:

* cpollcppsp (C++)

* go (Google)

* hhvm (PHP JIT by Facebook)

* openresty (LuaJIT on Nginx)

* undertow (Java)

* gemini (Java)