35 ms·

I agree completely! ... Well, almost agree completely. Daniel Stenberg is the author of curl: https://daniel.haxx.se/ https://daniel.haxx.se/ Nicolas Cannasse

I agree completely! ... Well, almost agree completely. Daniel Stenberg is the author of curl: https://daniel.haxx.se/ https://daniel.haxx.se/ Nicolas Cannasse is the (main) author of haxe: https://medium.com/@ncannasse https://medium.com/@ncannasse Both are awesome in their own right. I wrote the Lua target announced here, and am happy to answer any questions.

vidarh 10y ago
Meanwhile, Daniel also did a C-like language back in the day: FPL. It's never seen widespread use, but was the macro-language for his editor, FrexxEd, for the Amiga.
veli_joza 10y ago
Can you explain who is the target audience for Lua target? What can I do with it?
- mateuszf 10y ago
  My guess would be for current lua embedding scenarios - for example for use as a scripting language in games.
- i336_ 10y ago
  Well, with LuaJIT you get speed. How much speed? CloudFlare's firewall system uses LuaJIT to analyse approximately 4 million GET requests per second. (Small pause, reread) That much speed. That was the figure in June 2015, at least. Some of the autogenerated code looks like this: http://i.imgur.com/F5aT0NF.png http://i.imgur.com/F5aT0NF.png (snagged via pdfimages from http://www.slideshare.net/jgrahamc/lua-the-worlds-most-infuriating-language http://www.slideshare.net/jgrahamc/lua-the-worlds-most-infur...) This video was where I had my major TIL moment: http://www.thedotpost.com/2015/06/john-graham-cumming-i-got-10-trillion-problems-but-logging-aint-one http://www.thedotpost.com/2015/06/john-graham-cumming-i-got-... I also got the impression from the one other page of autogenerated code briefly visible in this video that the firewall logic is also full of regular expressions. And yet, it completes its analysis in roughly less than 1 millisecond. It's almost a crime I haven't learned LuaJIT yet. :P That said, looking at the slideshare link, you can see that Lua as a language has some pretty annoying syntax, so I've sorta been shying away from it. So maybe I'll learn HaXe instead. :D
  - delroth 10y ago
    > CloudFlare's firewall system uses LuaJIT to analyse approximately 4 million GET requests per second. While I agree with your premise (LuaJIT is a pretty awesome project), this example means nothing in terms of performance. — "analyse" doesn't give an indication of the workload -- it could vary from "matching against a precompiled regexp" to running advanced statistical models. — 4 millions requests per second does not mean anything without knowing the size of the deployment. You can always throw more hardware at a "trivially" parallelizable problem. — Throughput is only one dimension on the "speed" continuum, latency (and especially tail latency) is also very important. Some languages have very good throughput and fail hard at tail latency (Java, Go until recently). Some others have lower throughput but more predictable latency.
    - i336_ 10y ago
      You make incredibly fair points and I don't have the data to answer what you've raised. This could be lack of research or the fact that CF hasn't released it. I expect a 20/80 non-researched/non-available mix. My understanding is that the WAF detects trivial stuff like SQL injection and XSS, and the video also mentions it detected ShellShock and so forth (yeah, this was a while ago). "Thousands of regular expressions" is mentioned verbally in the video around ~11:25. That's where I got that from. There are some bits mentioned about the hardware around 19:30: - E5-2630v3 (16 cores, 32 w/ HT which is turned off), 128GB RAM, 10Gbps - Custom built by Quanta: 4 nodes per 2U (each node is like half-width and 1U high), redundant 2xPSU in the middle - 40 machines run Kafka storing 400TB of log data (ingest @ 15Gbps), 50TB disk per node - 5 machines run CitusDB (sharded PostgreSQL) to power realtime graph generation, 12TB SSD per node - 100+ machines for realtime analytics running Go (and presumably LuaJIT) - LuaJIT seems to be the realtime "hmm, interesting" flagging system, while Go is used for in-depth intelligent analysis that's (I assume) slightly behind realtime. Also, the video is actually over here - https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=LA-gNoxSLCE https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=LA-gNoxSLCE --- I'm curious to understand what tail latency is, and very interested to learn more about language latency and performance in general. What subjects would you recommend I learn about / read? (I would describe myself as interested from a hobbyist-intermediate standpont, but from a non-academic POV; I unfortunately get dismally lost with formulaic presentations, math is not a strong subject for me.)
- knotz 10y ago
  You can build a pretty damn good simulation of a Boeing 737-300 with it. (http://ixeg.net/ http://ixeg.net/)
trevex 10y ago
Lua is still my goto embedded scripting language. I don't have any experience with haxe per se, but is the transpiler embeddable as well?
- yoklov 10y ago
  The compiler is written in ocaml, so I'd guess not.
tomcam 10y ago
Thanks for the authorship correction! Sorry, Daniel Stenberg, you complete stud!

vidarh 10y ago

Meanwhile, Daniel also did a C-like language back in the day: FPL. It's never seen widespread use, but was the macro-language for his editor, FrexxEd, for the Amiga.

veli_joza 10y ago

Can you explain who is the target audience for Lua target? What can I do with it?

mateuszf 10y ago
My guess would be for current lua embedding scenarios - for example for use as a scripting language in games.
i336_ 10y ago
Well, with LuaJIT you get speed. How much speed? CloudFlare's firewall system uses LuaJIT to analyse approximately 4 million GET requests per second. (Small pause, reread) That much speed. That was the figure in June 2015, at least. Some of the autogenerated code looks like this: http://i.imgur.com/F5aT0NF.png http://i.imgur.com/F5aT0NF.png (snagged via pdfimages from http://www.slideshare.net/jgrahamc/lua-the-worlds-most-infuriating-language http://www.slideshare.net/jgrahamc/lua-the-worlds-most-infur...) This video was where I had my major TIL moment: http://www.thedotpost.com/2015/06/john-graham-cumming-i-got-10-trillion-problems-but-logging-aint-one http://www.thedotpost.com/2015/06/john-graham-cumming-i-got-... I also got the impression from the one other page of autogenerated code briefly visible in this video that the firewall logic is also full of regular expressions. And yet, it completes its analysis in roughly less than 1 millisecond. It's almost a crime I haven't learned LuaJIT yet. :P That said, looking at the slideshare link, you can see that Lua as a language has some pretty annoying syntax, so I've sorta been shying away from it. So maybe I'll learn HaXe instead. :D
- delroth 10y ago
  > CloudFlare's firewall system uses LuaJIT to analyse approximately 4 million GET requests per second. While I agree with your premise (LuaJIT is a pretty awesome project), this example means nothing in terms of performance. — "analyse" doesn't give an indication of the workload -- it could vary from "matching against a precompiled regexp" to running advanced statistical models. — 4 millions requests per second does not mean anything without knowing the size of the deployment. You can always throw more hardware at a "trivially" parallelizable problem. — Throughput is only one dimension on the "speed" continuum, latency (and especially tail latency) is also very important. Some languages have very good throughput and fail hard at tail latency (Java, Go until recently). Some others have lower throughput but more predictable latency.
  - i336_ 10y ago
    You make incredibly fair points and I don't have the data to answer what you've raised. This could be lack of research or the fact that CF hasn't released it. I expect a 20/80 non-researched/non-available mix. My understanding is that the WAF detects trivial stuff like SQL injection and XSS, and the video also mentions it detected ShellShock and so forth (yeah, this was a while ago). "Thousands of regular expressions" is mentioned verbally in the video around ~11:25. That's where I got that from. There are some bits mentioned about the hardware around 19:30: - E5-2630v3 (16 cores, 32 w/ HT which is turned off), 128GB RAM, 10Gbps - Custom built by Quanta: 4 nodes per 2U (each node is like half-width and 1U high), redundant 2xPSU in the middle - 40 machines run Kafka storing 400TB of log data (ingest @ 15Gbps), 50TB disk per node - 5 machines run CitusDB (sharded PostgreSQL) to power realtime graph generation, 12TB SSD per node - 100+ machines for realtime analytics running Go (and presumably LuaJIT) - LuaJIT seems to be the realtime "hmm, interesting" flagging system, while Go is used for in-depth intelligent analysis that's (I assume) slightly behind realtime. Also, the video is actually over here - https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=LA-gNoxSLCE https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=LA-gNoxSLCE --- I'm curious to understand what tail latency is, and very interested to learn more about language latency and performance in general. What subjects would you recommend I learn about / read? (I would describe myself as interested from a hobbyist-intermediate standpont, but from a non-academic POV; I unfortunately get dismally lost with formulaic presentations, math is not a strong subject for me.)
knotz 10y ago
You can build a pretty damn good simulation of a Boeing 737-300 with it. (http://ixeg.net/ http://ixeg.net/)

trevex 10y ago

Lua is still my goto embedded scripting language. I don't have any experience with haxe per se, but is the transpiler embeddable as well?

yoklov 10y ago
The compiler is written in ocaml, so I'd guess not.

tomcam 10y ago

Thanks for the authorship correction! Sorry, Daniel Stenberg, you complete stud!