These apps are mostly microservices and the Java ones are mostly only a year or two old. None of them use things like spring. Some use Dropwizard. Would you consider dropwizard modern? If not, what would you use instead?
DropWizard is modern, but it isn't fast. Go and even Node.js are significantly faster. If you want performance, you cut layers out of the stack - check out the numbers for raw servlets or even just straight Jersey annotations in that benchmark. If I were doing JSON-over-HTTP microservices in Java, I'd likely use straight Jersey + Jackson, or if performance was really a problem, Boon over straight servlets.
What framework did your Go rewrite use? The standard libs?
On first glance the dropwizard test app appears to be doomed to mediocrity via reliance on hibernate.
Call me crazy, but I like my dropwizard with Spring DI for (singleton) resource setup, a micro-ORM to get work done, and HikariCP datasources at runtime.
What's wrong with hibernate? The only thing I can think of is that you're not using "JOIN FETCH entity.relation" when accessing collections and end up with the N+1 select problem but that is because you're using any ORM incorrectly.
Entity framework has include and active record has includes which do the same thing. The qt ORM also has something similar.
The only ORM I have seen that lacks this critical feature is odb. It doesn't allow setting the fetching strategy on a per query basis. You have to either always use eager loading or lazy loading which basically makes it useless for my purposes.
Well, for benchmarking the essential framework, which does not mandate any ORM, I would want to use something for data access that takes the question of time spent on type reflection, internal caching, and the like, out of the picture. Hibernate and EMF have their place, but not as part of benchmarking the thing that hosts 'em. Core Dropwizard performance is all about how it uses Jetty, Jackson, and maps requests to resources and operations.
Use vertx if you want lean REST micro-services. I so wish vertx was part of the standard library.
The main advantages that Go has over Java is that the standard library is brilliant - thus obviating the need for folks to create monstrous frameworks (and losing performance) and that Go has better memory utilization because of value types (structs) and because it is AOT compiled. Unfortunately Java JIT as designed by the JVM devs takes a lot of memory.
In raw performance, I would still give the edge to Java over Golang though.
A lot more to an app than MCV framework. I realize dropwizard tries to be the everything for the app, but at the core it is a MVC with some bundled libs.
https://www.techempower.com/benchmarks/
DropWizard is modern, but it isn't fast. Go and even Node.js are significantly faster. If you want performance, you cut layers out of the stack - check out the numbers for raw servlets or even just straight Jersey annotations in that benchmark. If I were doing JSON-over-HTTP microservices in Java, I'd likely use straight Jersey + Jackson, or if performance was really a problem, Boon over straight servlets.
What framework did your Go rewrite use? The standard libs?