While I agree with the general sentiment, scripting languages are perfectly fine to use for server software. Would you call hackernews slow? Its been running on lisp (originally Arc, now common lisp) for its entire existence.
Another fun example of popular interpreter is, y’know, the JVM.
Common lisp could be compiled, so not the best example.
Lua is a way better example, since Lua scripts often finish in the time it takes Python to get going at all. And that’s with interpreted Lua, without JIT. I once straight up had to recheck if I left the dummy static output in there instead of calling my script, because the result was appearing instantly.
Performance is an attractive metric because it’s something you can put a number on. It’s measurable, so comparisons are easy.
But there are so many other metrics that are more important.
Still, https://leafo.net/lapis/ looks like something I’d like to try sometime. I don’t know anything about the Lua web framework ecosystem, that’s just the first search result I found. Do you have any recommendations?
I’m a big fan of lapis. It’s built on openresty, a fork of nginx that embeds luajit into it. This means you can make use of all the features nginx has in your application. It’s really fast in my experience.
There isn’t really much of an ecosystem around lua, lapis is really the only “proper” framework. There is stuff like redbean and mako which are cool, but not as complete/friendly to use as lapis imo.
Luarocks can be a bit of a pain as well (make sure to install packages for lua 5.1).
Lapis is made by the same person who made itch.io too, which i think it cool.
While I agree with the general sentiment, scripting languages are perfectly fine to use for server software. Would you call hackernews slow? Its been running on lisp (originally Arc, now common lisp) for its entire existence. Another fun example of popular interpreter is, y’know, the JVM.
Common lisp could be compiled, so not the best example.
Lua is a way better example, since Lua scripts often finish in the time it takes Python to get going at all. And that’s with interpreted Lua, without JIT. I once straight up had to recheck if I left the dummy static output in there instead of calling my script, because the result was appearing instantly.
Performance is an attractive metric because it’s something you can put a number on. It’s measurable, so comparisons are easy.
But there are so many other metrics that are more important.
Still, https://leafo.net/lapis/ looks like something I’d like to try sometime. I don’t know anything about the Lua web framework ecosystem, that’s just the first search result I found. Do you have any recommendations?
I’m a big fan of lapis. It’s built on openresty, a fork of nginx that embeds luajit into it. This means you can make use of all the features nginx has in your application. It’s really fast in my experience.
I have a medium-ish project written in lapis here: https://codeberg.org/irelephant/kittygram
There isn’t really much of an ecosystem around lua, lapis is really the only “proper” framework. There is stuff like redbean and mako which are cool, but not as complete/friendly to use as lapis imo.
Luarocks can be a bit of a pain as well (make sure to install packages for lua 5.1).
Lapis is made by the same person who made itch.io too, which i think it cool.
Great to see a real app built with it. It reminds me of Flask a lot, although I guess all mvc frameworks are pretty similar.