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We Tested 7 Languages Under Extreme Load and Only One Didn't Crash

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Re: We Tested 7 Languages Under Extreme Load and Only One Didn't Crash

#31

Post by taavi013 »

mrweasel wrote: post #4

Not really sure why Erlang wasn't the predictable survivor? That's kinda Erlangs whole claim to fame. The various error/failure modes are interesting, but not unexpected in retrospect. I'm still not a fan of the Erlang syntax, it's so hard to read. It's probably just because I've mostly used C inspired language.

Actually Erlang syntax is very nice. You just have to get over first confusion of language functional nature and prolog heritage.

It helps tremendously, that in Erlang functions are quite short, self contained due to functional nature. And you can grasp essence of function on one screen without need to have background knowledge of scattered mess of classes/global variables/other spaghetti.

Really pleasant for reading code.

But definitely not C inspired language.

Re: We Tested 7 Languages Under Extreme Load and Only One Didn't Crash

#32

Post by benmmurphy »

on_the_train wrote: post #8

I'm calling bs. That article is way too vague on what those " error cascade simulation" actually is supposed to be. The results sound exactly what an LLM think it would happen, but wouldn't actually happen in practice. Rust doesn't magically get "failures in unsafe code regions" when under load. And those few lines of c++ don't have "memory management issues". It's just the first bullshit LLMs come up with

you could have failures in unsafe regions you have written yourself to handle concurrency when under load. of course this begs the question why are you writing such unsafe code. i don't think such code would be idiomatic for an engineer with 5 years of rust experience to write. of course there is no links to the full code so its impossible to check the code.

Re: We Tested 7 Languages Under Extreme Load and Only One Didn't Crash

#34

Post by 0x000xca0xfe »

benterix wrote: post #33

Although as a fan of Elixir I agree somewhat with some of the conclusions of the article, it deserves flagging as a HN submission because of flawed methodology, lack of numbers and clickbaity title (yes, clickbaiting is passe).

Thank you. The article sounds like it could have been a fantastic research and even help fix some compiler/standard library bugs on the side. But in reality it probably was generated by ChatGPT. I've load tested NodeJS myself and had a different failure mode (connections getting dropped, not "cascading failures", whatever this means).

Re: We Tested 7 Languages Under Extreme Load and Only One Didn't Crash

#35

Post by burnt-resistor »

jiggawatts wrote: post #29
gizmo wrote: post #6

All systems crash "under memory pressure" but there are no details provided that show what the actual issues are? You can write software that is very robust under memory pressure in a low level language, for instance by forking into multiple worker processes. If a process dies because of OOM this would then not affect any of the other processes. The kernel will do all necessary cleanup and do so nearly instantly. I a…

It reads like an astroturf advertisement for a product, but Erlang is open source and free. It's a worthless article anyway for the simple reason that there are no graphs, numbers, or reproducible experiments. The code snippets aren't the whole programs and the test harness setup isn't spelled out. The programs themselves look different in what they're doing, so they're not even equivalent! It's hard to tell because,…

Data or it didn't happen.

It seems like an ideological shitpost.

Re: We Tested 7 Languages Under Extreme Load and Only One Didn't Crash

#37

Post by yetihehe »

0x000xca0xfe wrote: post #34
benterix wrote: post #33

Although as a fan of Elixir I agree somewhat with some of the conclusions of the article, it deserves flagging as a HN submission because of flawed methodology, lack of numbers and clickbaity title (yes, clickbaiting is passe).

Thank you. The article sounds like it could have been a fantastic research and even help fix some compiler/standard library bugs on the side. But in reality it probably was generated by ChatGPT. I've load tested NodeJS myself and had a different failure mode (connections getting dropped, not "cascading failures", whatever this means).

I've load tested erlang and had cascading failures in my code. While I love it, erlang is not a silver bullet. I also managed to find a one-liner that will block whole erlang vm for many minutes with 100%cpu usage on only one core, so it's not perfect here too, but it's one of those "well, don't do that in this way" cases. Joe Armstrong was intrigued :D
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