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Web Applications Should Be Compiled

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Re: Web Applications Should Be Compiled

#121

Post by ubernostrum »

timr wrote: post #117
rbanffy wrote: post #111

Earlier quoted context omitted.

"Your comment adds less to an intelligent discussion than does the article you're calling a troll." Sometimes the truth is very simple. It can be considered a troll because it is in the tone "if you don't do as I say you are an idiot, like everyone else". Second: not all scripting languages are interpreted on the fly. In fact, many of the most popular frameworks load objects once and keep their compiled forms in memo…

Even though the tone of the article was abrasive, it was far more interesting and insightful than the one-line comment to which I responded. Your asserted arguments for dynamic languages are well-trodden ground: Assertion: "Some scripting languages are as fast as compiled languages." No, not really. I challenge you to prove that statement with a non-trivial benchmark. Assertion: "most of the time, web apps are waitin…

"There's no reason that it can't be handling other requests while waiting for a DB response or a pipe."

Concurrent request processing most likely belongs in the server, not in the application.

"Scaling Rails is a nightmare."

For someone who complains of "well-trodden ground" in others' arguments, you certainly seem to have a deeply-rooted belief in the myth that particular languages and/or frameworks "scale" or "don't scale".

Re: Web Applications Should Be Compiled

#122

Post by ubernostrum »

albertcardona wrote: post #30
goodkarma wrote: post #12

If you're going to write it in C, why not just write it in Java? You could use the Google Web Toolkit..

Rather, write in python, profile it, and replace all CPU-intensive functions by C code in a custom python module. Best of both worlds.

Or write it in Python, then run it under Jython.

Re: Web Applications Should Be Compiled

#123

Post by edw519 »

raganwald wrote: post #82
axod wrote: post #80

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I agree, but TBH there have been a lot of ridiculously overhyped blog posts/articles telling us how totally awesome every scripting language is, and how it's completely a 'game changer' and how you can do completely revolutionary things in them really easily. I guess this is just a reaction to the froth+hype. Both sides need to step away from the keyboard, and calm down.

If a blog post says "wonderful, amazing, fun, life-affirming," we can always respond with "oh? what about..." My thought is that there's no need for a post saying "You're gonna die if you try to build a social bookmarking site in Lisp" regardless of how much fun other people are having doing it. What have people got against enthusiasm, any ways? There's some kind of weird puritanical thing going around programming cu…

"Isn't that exactly the attitude you're supposed to have in your twenties?"

Why stop? It's a great attitude to have forever.

Re: Web Applications Should Be Compiled

#125

Post by jimbokun »

timr wrote: post #117
rbanffy wrote: post #111

Earlier quoted context omitted.

"Your comment adds less to an intelligent discussion than does the article you're calling a troll." Sometimes the truth is very simple. It can be considered a troll because it is in the tone "if you don't do as I say you are an idiot, like everyone else". Second: not all scripting languages are interpreted on the fly. In fact, many of the most popular frameworks load objects once and keep their compiled forms in memo…

Even though the tone of the article was abrasive, it was far more interesting and insightful than the one-line comment to which I responded. Your asserted arguments for dynamic languages are well-trodden ground: Assertion: "Some scripting languages are as fast as compiled languages." No, not really. I challenge you to prove that statement with a non-trivial benchmark. Assertion: "most of the time, web apps are waitin…

"Scaling Rails is a nightmare."

I find this similar to Woody's fear in the following exchange:

Cliff Clavin: Boy oh boy, talk about your lucky days, huh, I just found twenty smackers back there in the pool room. And to celebrate my good fortune, I'm going to buy a round a drinks for all my friends.

Carla Tortelli: What are you going to do with the other nineteen bucks?

Sam Malone: Woody, that could be your twenty dollar bill, the one you lost.

Woody Boyd: Hey yeah, you know I was in the pool room earlier.

Cliff Clavin: Hey, wait a second. Let's be fair about this. Give me the serial number.

Sam Malone: Oh, come on man. Nobody knows serial numbers.

Woody Boyd: L21886119B

Cliff Clavin: [hands the bill to Woody] That's amazing.

Sam Malone: How did you do that?

Woody Boyd: I memorize the serial numbers on all my currency.

Sam Malone: Why?

Woody Boyd: For just such an occasion. Tell you though, I pray every day I don't get rich.

http://www.imdb.com/character/ch0003010/quotes

Not quite a perfect analogy, but my point is worrying about scaling is a very good problem to have, and is likely to be accompanied by the resources to fix it. Twitter is the poster child for Rails scaling problems, but they re-wrote the parts they needed to write, and people kept using it because they liked the service even when they did have scaling problems.

Re: Web Applications Should Be Compiled

#126

Post by menloparkbum »

raganwald wrote: post #82
axod wrote: post #80

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I agree, but TBH there have been a lot of ridiculously overhyped blog posts/articles telling us how totally awesome every scripting language is, and how it's completely a 'game changer' and how you can do completely revolutionary things in them really easily. I guess this is just a reaction to the froth+hype. Both sides need to step away from the keyboard, and calm down.

If a blog post says "wonderful, amazing, fun, life-affirming," we can always respond with "oh? what about..." My thought is that there's no need for a post saying "You're gonna die if you try to build a social bookmarking site in Lisp" regardless of how much fun other people are having doing it. What have people got against enthusiasm, any ways? There's some kind of weird puritanical thing going around programming cu…

What have people got against enthusiasm, any ways?

The ruby and rails fervor never read like genuine enthusiasm. The pro-rails bits were always framed with negative comments about how php and java sucked, or how stupid business people are. Even DHH has a lot of this in his blog posts and talks. I thought it read more like an abuse victim or recovering addict who found a religious support group. It was always a bit manic sounding.

I'm a bit cynical but I think a critical mindset is the bane of the engineer, or really any maker. If people are zealously gushing about their framework, something dark is lurking underneath...

Re: Web Applications Should Be Compiled

#127

Post by raganwald »

edw519 wrote: post #123
raganwald wrote: post #82

Earlier quoted context omitted.

If a blog post says "wonderful, amazing, fun, life-affirming," we can always respond with "oh? what about..." My thought is that there's no need for a post saying "You're gonna die if you try to build a social bookmarking site in Lisp" regardless of how much fun other people are having doing it. What have people got against enthusiasm, any ways? There's some kind of weird puritanical thing going around programming cu…

"Isn't that exactly the attitude you're supposed to have in your twenties?" Why stop? It's a great attitude to have forever.

Does my writing read like I'm telling kids to get off my lawn? If so, please tell me, I own a funhouse mirror. When I look into it, I see a guy that still loves programming and thinking about for its own sake...

Re: Web Applications Should Be Compiled

#128

Post by rbanffy »

timr wrote: post #117
rbanffy wrote: post #111

Earlier quoted context omitted.

"Your comment adds less to an intelligent discussion than does the article you're calling a troll." Sometimes the truth is very simple. It can be considered a troll because it is in the tone "if you don't do as I say you are an idiot, like everyone else". Second: not all scripting languages are interpreted on the fly. In fact, many of the most popular frameworks load objects once and keep their compiled forms in memo…

Even though the tone of the article was abrasive, it was far more interesting and insightful than the one-line comment to which I responded. Your asserted arguments for dynamic languages are well-trodden ground: Assertion: "Some scripting languages are as fast as compiled languages." No, not really. I challenge you to prove that statement with a non-trivial benchmark. Assertion: "most of the time, web apps are waitin…

"If a web app is spending most of it's time blocking for I/O, it's poorly designed. There's no reason that it can't be handling other requests while waiting for a DB response or a pipe"

If your request-handling logic is responsible for concurrent requests, your application (and the platform it runs on) is poorly designed. This belongs to a thread/process dispatch mechanism in the platform, not inside your app. When one thread waits for the database, I am sure the processors can be busy with other requests.

"Scaling Rails is a nightmare."

No. It's not. There is little reason for it to be. While I am no Rails expert (I use Django and was a Plone guy not that long ago), the scalability issues most people have happen because of RDBMS concurrency much more than any problem with Rails itself. Like I said before, that time spent waiting for the database to respond is time spent in the database working. It is incredibly rare to have a front-end having heavier usage than the database that feeds it.

If you want your applications to scale, design it around the database limitations. Use C, C++ (I would prefer ObjC), Java or Assembly if you want, but faster request processing won't get you past database scalability issues.

Using C* or Java will only push back your release date.

Re: Web Applications Should Be Compiled

#129

Post by nkurz »

grayhacker wrote: post #21

No. You really don't want to do this. Really. I have worked with a project for the past several years that, by necessity not choice, required a web application framework written in C (it's an embedded platform) and I can tell you it is pure hell. The most mundane and simple tasks, often trivial one-liners in scripting languages, require many lines of error-prone C code even with a fairly rich set of libraries availab…

The most mundane and simple tasks, often trivial one-liners in scripting languages, require many lines of error-prone C code even with a fairly rich set of libraries available.

What would be an example of this? I'm mostly a C and Perl person, and once a library is available I've never noticed cases where something was much simpler to write in one than the other. That library might take more time to write in C than Perl, but once it's written I find it just about (less than a factor of 2?) as easy to write the application logic in C as in Perl. My instinct is that if you're writing 'many lines of error-prone C' to do something simple, there's probably room for improvement somewhere.

Re: Web Applications Should Be Compiled

#130

Post by menloparkbum »

rbanffy wrote: post #128
timr wrote: post #117

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Even though the tone of the article was abrasive, it was far more interesting and insightful than the one-line comment to which I responded. Your asserted arguments for dynamic languages are well-trodden ground: Assertion: "Some scripting languages are as fast as compiled languages." No, not really. I challenge you to prove that statement with a non-trivial benchmark. Assertion: "most of the time, web apps are waitin…

"If a web app is spending most of it's time blocking for I/O, it's poorly designed. There's no reason that it can't be handling other requests while waiting for a DB response or a pipe" If your request-handling logic is responsible for concurrent requests, your application (and the platform it runs on) is poorly designed. This belongs to a thread/process dispatch mechanism in the platform, not inside your app. When o…

In my experience once you get over a few hundred thousand users and have tweaked your web server/proxy setup and tuned your database, you will still have major slowness and memory issues with your Rails code. I.e. it's usually not the database's fault.

Also you might want to look at the profile of the guy who said that rails scaling is a nightmare. I wouldn't use the word nightmare as I'd prefer to think my professional life story wasn't written by Kafka. But, I don't know anyone who has scaled a big Rails site and thought it was a pleasant or fun experience. Most guys who say that it's no big deal haven't really done it.

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