[preseinger]

go is pretty fast

in fact, i have a standing bet with some of my rustacean friends that they can't show me a typical HTTP service in rust, which has performance numbers (rps, latency, throughput) that i can't meet or beat in go

of course lots of caveats there, what does normal-ish mean, well probably most of the work is gonna be i/o bound, it should run on normal server-class hardware, et cetera et cetera

but nothing yet

[api]

For most compiled languages or languages with very good VMs like Java benchmarks are really testing the quality of the implementation and the depth of the implementor's understanding.

I'd bet that very good Go and Rust programmers could probably converge to almost identical performance.

What I wouldn't be on is that Go could equal Rust in the area of small memory footprint or on small devices.

[jrockway]

> What I wouldn't be on is that Go could equal Rust in the area of small memory footprint or on small devices.

I haven't found a microcontroller that's too small for tinygo. I have even used time.Format(time.RFC3339) on one before. $1 spent on a microcontroller is the ultimate luxury these days.

[ilyt]

> I'd bet that very good Go and Rust programmers could probably converge to almost identical performance.

I'd imagine probably not purely because Rust uses LLVM which is VERY good at optimizing, while Go compiler is simpler and made for speed of compilation first. If Go got LLVM frontend yeah, maybe

> What I wouldn't be on is that Go could equal Rust in the area of small memory footprint or on small devices.

Well, Go is GCed, that automatically makes it use at least a bit more, and also carrying code for GC with each program.

[pyth0]

> If Go got LLVM frontend yeah, maybe

While Go probably wont get an official LLVM frontend, the TinyGo project [1] is trying to bring Go to embedded systems and it does use LLVM. Unfortunately I couldn't find any use for it in a project since it lacks so many features from mainline Go. Maybe I'll check back in a few years.

[1] https://tinygo.org/

[whalesalad]

unrelated but your username is solid gold

[ThePhysicist]

That's my experience as well. Recently I rewrote a Golang-based QUIC server in Rust and I had a hard time getting it to perform equally well. Certainly possible but requires a lot of hand-tuning and knowing exactly what you do. In Golang you just spawn a Go routine for each request and avoid lock-based shared state as much as possible and you're mostly good, the runtime will manage all aspects like number of threads, allocations etc. for you.

One area where Rust is still better are memory-constrained environments e.g. on mobile and on microcontroller, though there's tinygo and the Go runtime gets slimmer as well, so now you can have binaries and memory footprints smaller than 5 MB on most mobile platforms, which is absolutely acceptable even for budget phones. I think Tailscale e.g. runs their modified version of wireguard-go on all mobile clients without issues.

[_0w8t]

Caddy (a web server written in Go) is like two times slower than Nginx on many benchmarks.

[hnav]

caddy is written in terms of net/http, nginx is written right on top of epoll/kqueue with bespoke HTTP/1x parser in a manually memory managed language. I think the point was not that go is "faster" than anything, it's that it makes it easy to write hard-to-beat network software once you get out of the realm of toy or highly specialized problems.

[behIiis]

Maybe a highly tuned nginx by a Russian neckbeard. Who ridiculed you for ever attempting to use nginx without first consulting with an archaic text.

Otherwise nginx is a piece of garbage web-server that likes to pretend it’s 1995. On top of that, it’s one of the most inhospitable toxic communities I’ve ever encountered.

I’d take caddy any day of the week over nginx.

[adam_arthur]

Seems Rust places well in some composite benchmarks. Go is further down the list. Of course this depends on the quality of the implementation and doesn't account for UX/usability

https://www.techempower.com/benchmarks/#section=data-r21&tes...

[ThePhysicist]

According to that benchmark, Javascript seems to be the way to go.

[adam_arthur]

Not familiar with Just, but seems its designed as a minimal wrapper over v8. The benchmark code is probably jumping directly from JS to native code... most of the github repo is C++

Edit: There's actually an article that explains how Just ranks so highly https://just.billywhizz.io/blog/on-javascript-performance-01...