What makes something "notable"? • Hacker News Board

Re: What makes something "notable"?

#11

Post by FooBarWidget » Tue, Oct 30, 2012, 9:34 AM UTC

I modded this submission up not because I agree with it but because I want a discussion. The G-WAN author has been known being... confident. He claims to be faster and more scalable than Nginx by a significant factor. He attributes the speed partially to the fact that his code contains few branches, where he defines even function calls as branches. Both statements are bold claims, and I can only imagine how it would take a genius to maintain "branchless" code like that.

Leaving that aside, I feel that the article focuses too much on the hype words. Yes some of the hype is over the top and focuses too much on the coolness factor, yes some of the reasons given for using Node is total nonsense (e.g. what he quoted from the Wikipedia article). But none of that invalidates the valid reasons for choosing Node:

- Javascript is so much easier to program for than C/C++. This is a fact; he mentioned it several times in his article but then brushes off these claims. Writing Phusion Passenger 4's new evented architecture in C++ has been an extremely intensive effort. There's just so much you need to be aware of and take care of, Javascript would have speeded up development significantly. If course we couldn't and didn't: being system software, Phusion Passenger's core cannot rely on Javascript and must be optimized for speed.

- Javascript is fast enough for quite a lot of server software. Of course C wipes the floor with everything. If you don't mind spending 4 times longer to ship your product to market. Oh yeah, good luck recruiting that brilliant C programmer, I hope you live in a place where they are easy to come by. His bold claim that G-WAN's Javascript engine uses 2444x less resources is a bold one, but if in the end you have 2 million users and you can still handle them with 1 or 2 servers, then switching to G-WAN does not give you a lot of added advantage.

- G-WAN runs everything in-process!! Of course everything is faster then!!! It's because there's no need to perform inter-process communication and CPU synchronization, which often require (relatively slow) kernel intervention. But if one component dies, your entire web server goes down. Better hope the application programmer never makes a mistake. With Phusion Passenger we've explicitly chosen not to utilize an in-process architecture because it causes to much pain, even if it's faster.

There's also at least one logical fallacy in the article:

_"Node.js' CPU & RAM usage is so high that the scale had to be resized. The chaotic curves do not give the feeling of anything seriously engineered."_

He puts two separate scales in the same graph and then claims this? That doesn't make any sense.

Where is the source code for the benchmark? How did the benchmark look like and what's the methodology? No mention of it.

I wish the G-WAN author would focus more on the technicalities instead of trying to fight the hype. That would make the entire article much more interesting. Why is G-WAN faster? What's the difference between Node and G-WAN's Javascript engine? Etcetera. G-WAN is a very interesting product but it would have so much more potential if the author communicates in a less inflammatory and emotional way, and behaves more professionally.

Re: What makes something "notable"?

#12

Post by w0utert » Tue, Oct 30, 2012, 9:38 AM UTC

Einherji wrote: post #2

I hear this a lot. Node.js seems to have gained quite a bit of popularity though, I see developers swear by it like a religion regularly.

> I see developers swear by it like a religion regularly.

To me, that signals there is at least something fishy about the technology.

I'm not saying Node is bad, but I sincerely have the impression that a large majority of developers who like Node.js are mainly using it because it's 'hot technology' right now, not because it fits their technology problem so well. Event-based asynchronous servers are nice for some things, but definitely not for everything. If that were the case, Twistd and Tornado would have been much more popular before Node.js even existed. My perception is that Node.js is primarily popular because it attracted hordes of client-side developers to server programming, something that used to be too inaccessible before. Hard to dislike something that instantly gives you the impression you can write your own servers.

Re: What makes something "notable"?

#13

Post by Torn » Tue, Oct 30, 2012, 9:38 AM UTC

boothead wrote: post #9

I've seen some comments/postings to HN about g-wan, and I still can't work out if it's some really elaborate troll or not. Has anyone played with it? I can't imagine that this very strange license section in the FAQ: http://gwan.ch/faq#license , is going to help people want to try it! edit Grammar

The formatting and the delivery on that site are confusing; both feel somewhat aggressive. It could just be a chinese / cultural / marketing thing we're not used to, or maybe the author's a little too confident.

Based on a quick google, it does appear GWAN is massively fast at serving static files, and it does appear to be gaining traction for script-based use-cases.

I'd be interested in seeing more real-world benchmarks.

Re: What makes something "notable"?

#14

Post by FooBarWidget » Tue, Oct 30, 2012, 9:42 AM UTC

Torn wrote: post #13

boothead wrote: post #9

I've seen some comments/postings to HN about g-wan, and I still can't work out if it's some really elaborate troll or not. Has anyone played with it? I can't imagine that this very strange license section in the FAQ: http://gwan.ch/faq#license , is going to help people want to try it! edit Grammar

The formatting and the delivery on that site are confusing; both feel somewhat aggressive. It could just be a chinese / cultural / marketing thing we're not used to, or maybe the author's a little too confident. Based on a quick google, it does appear GWAN is massively fast at serving static files, and it does appear to be gaining traction for script-based use-cases. I'd be interested in seeing more real-world benchm…

The guy is from Switzerland: http://gwan.ch/about

Is anybody actually using G-WAN in production?

Re: What makes something "notable"?

#15

Post by FennNaten » Tue, Oct 30, 2012, 9:43 AM UTC

Managed to get throught the odd formatting, and I don't think the article's worth it. That's too bad, 'cause the idea looked interesting: it's true that parts of developers' community are subject to the "go onto hype" phenomenon, and I'd have read with pleasure a serious analysis of that, which could open a constructive debate. But here it's only a big rant mixed with conspiracy theory, about "why does everybody speaks about anything but g-wan", made up by somebody who obviously wants to get some buzz for his product.

Re: What makes something "notable"?

#16

Post by soup10 » Tue, Oct 30, 2012, 9:48 AM UTC

I see most new developments in web technologies as layers upon layers of frameworks designed to make it easier to create ever more complex web-based applications that will ultimately become irrelevant when people realize that the complexity and the scaling requirements of the applications being created are much better served by normal non-web focused programming languages.

With the success of the app store on iOS, vendors are realizing the value of eliminating the friction involved in installing native 'apps'. The sooner this happens the better, since it will mean much better software overall. Mail clients, word processors and mapping applications should not be written in javascript.

It's a damn shame that the OS vendors refuse to work together to make easily cross-platform native applications a reality. Thankfully though, if they create frictionless ways to use native code, frameworks and what not should be able to bridge the gap between OS specific API's and the hardware without performance issues. Moore's law will never make javascript word-processors good.

Javascript on the back-end just makes no sense to me whatsoever. Why not pick a programming language that was designed for the job, not something that was hacked together so it's somewhat passable at the job?

(by native i'm referring to languages traditionally used to bulid complex software, not just c/c++)

Re: What makes something "notable"?

#17

Post by _gfrc » Tue, Oct 30, 2012, 9:49 AM UTC

mikkom wrote: post #3

That's some really odd text formatting.

At first I thought he used some kind of text-generator, where you just have to fill in some blanks with buzzwords.

Re: What makes something "notable"?

#18

Post by FooBarWidget » Tue, Oct 30, 2012, 9:49 AM UTC

This submission was originally called "Node.js is all just hype"!

Apparently after 10 comments, the submitter renamed it to "What makes something notable?". At http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=4113514 I read that:

    "Pierre (the sole G-WAN author) says some funny things. He
    also defends G-WAN using dummy accounts all over the internet
    (StackOverflow, Reddit, Wikipedia, etc)."

The submitter, lehgo, happens to be created a week ago, and his only submissions have been about G-WAN. Coincidence?

Re: What makes something "notable"?

#19

Post by Jare » Tue, Oct 30, 2012, 10:15 AM UTC

w0utert wrote: post #12

Einherji wrote: post #2

I hear this a lot. Node.js seems to have gained quite a bit of popularity though, I see developers swear by it like a religion regularly.

> I see developers swear by it like a religion regularly. To me, that signals there is at least something fishy about the technology. I'm not saying Node is bad, but I sincerely have the impression that a large majority of developers who like Node.js are mainly using it because it's 'hot technology' right now, not because it fits their technology problem so well. Event-based asynchronous servers are nice for some thi…

Node is not everything to everyone, but for a lot of people, it's the right technology at the right time.

- Easy to install and use, especially for hordes of client side developers.

- Easy to manage packages and dependencies via npm.

- Fast and scalable for writing logic around data transportation.

Re: What makes something "notable"?

#20

Post by 1SaltwaterC » Tue, Oct 30, 2012, 10:31 AM UTC

FooBarWidget wrote: post #11

I modded this submission up not because I agree with it but because I want a discussion. The G-WAN author has been known being... confident. He claims to be faster and more scalable than Nginx by a significant factor. He attributes the speed partially to the fact that his code contains few branches, where he defines even function calls as branches. Both statements are bold claims, and I can only imagine how it would…

There's no "G-WAN's Javascript engine". Just plain old V8 embedded via a handler. You get just the basics, no batteries included aka you need to code the bindings to various things (like FS, crypto, etc) by yourself.

A year ago, a member of the former G-WAN community wrote a handler and V8 wrapper: https://gist.github.com/1077769. Guess that the G-WAN author (Pierre) tweaked that a little bit more.

Tested it myself. For simple "hello world" it was 5.5x faster than node. Quite impressive given the fact that a new V8 context is created with every request. But, again, no batteries included.