5 ms·

Yup, performance was one of the reasons I decided to port it to Rust. The other reason being that Rust gives you a single binary that is easier to deploy compar

Yup, performance was one of the reasons I decided to port it to Rust. The other reason being that Rust gives you a single binary that is easier to deploy compared to python.

inshadows 6y ago
Why do you need more performance from a CLI test tool? I'm honestly curious. It's basically curl (fast) plus simpler and easier interface and pretty printers. For performance in shell scripts you can use curl, and for troubleshooting the IO time dominates anyway.
- deleted 6y ago
  [deleted]
- thallada 6y ago
  Why use something slower when an equivalent faster tool is available? There's definitely a noticeable delay on my machine with starting up the python interpreter. Enough that it dominates most actual request times to fast servers. (`http get www.google.com` is ~460ms while `ht get www.google.com` is ~130ms) For a tool I'm constantly using to check APIs I'm developing, I really appreciate snappy commands that give me results that feel instantaneous.
- pdimitar 6y ago
  It adds up. I once tried to scrape an internal company website / API because we had no PDF exports and wanted to download + export to PDF, with `httpie`. It's an amazing tool but all the startup times compounded pretty badly. I switched to `curl` (which is a bit more pain until I got the full command line right, granted) and the script finished in ~95 minutes as opposed to the ~202 minutes it took with `httpie`. With about 0.5s startup time, it means every 120 requests add a full minute to the final time. And I had to scrape ~125K URLs back then. For a daily casual flow 0.5s startup time might not be much (although people like myself get irritated by that as well but I do recognize it's a minor inconvenience). But when doing mass-scripting such delays can very easily compound to non-trivial time inefficiencies.
  - Scarbutt 6y ago
    To be honest, you approached this problem pretty badly.
    - michaelmrose 6y ago
      This might be a useful comment if you had spent the time to offer thoughts on how it could be better. As it is this comment serves only to gratify your ego whereas advice might help readers. It's worse than adding nothing at all.
    - pdimitar 6y ago
      It was supposed to be a one-off task and I was confident at the time that I can script it quickly. I still scripted it but it took at least half a day. I'll still behind the idea that one has to be able to do one-off tasks without starting a dedicated programming project. It's what scripting languages are meant for. But I did misjudge the speed at which I'll be able to finish the task, that much is true. Ironically I knew exactly what to do from the start but several small and annoying quirks of the shell scripting languages lost me quite a bit of time.
    - killingtime74 6y ago
      Your comment is approached pretty badly.
  - dharmab 6y ago
    For mass-scripting I'd prefer to use a native HTTP library with connection pooling.
    - pdimitar 6y ago
      Sure, I can agree with that somewhat. Still, it was an one-off thing and I didn't want to turn it into a project. Using a for loop, `curl`, `wkhtmltopdf` and `parallel` eventually did the job.
      - j0057 6y ago
- bschwindHN 6y ago
  Because slow startup time is obnoxious for any command-line script. There's no reason to start up an entire scripting virtual machine just to make an HTTP request. No one should be writing serious CLI tools in an interpreted language.
  - inshadows 6y ago
    And yet for decades serious CLI tools are being written in POSIX shell, Bash, Zsh, Awk, Tcl, Perl, Ruby, Python, and no one really complained about speed until now, when hardware is so fast, finally people are starting to notice slow startup times??? C'mon. Python is not Java.
    - bschwindHN 6y ago
      I can definitely tell a difference, and it's irritating. The authors of these tools might not notice or care but I actively avoid them. Magic wormhole is one such example.
pdimitar 6y ago
Nice work! As shared down-thread, I really loved and wanted to use `httpie` but the non-trivial amount of startup has put me off. Very happy that you made a Rust alternative because I really don't like `curl` that much -- it requires quite the amount of incantations for non-trivial requests. `ht` and `httpie` definitely improve ergonomics at important places. So, kudos!

Yup, performance was one of the reasons I decided to port it to Rust. The other reason being that Rust gives you a single binary that is easier to deploy compared to python.

inshadows 6y ago

Why do you need more performance from a CLI test tool? I'm honestly curious. It's basically curl (fast) plus simpler and easier interface and pretty printers. For performance in shell scripts you can use curl, and for troubleshooting the IO time dominates anyway.

deleted 6y ago
[deleted]
thallada 6y ago
Why use something slower when an equivalent faster tool is available? There's definitely a noticeable delay on my machine with starting up the python interpreter. Enough that it dominates most actual request times to fast servers. (`http get www.google.com` is ~460ms while `ht get www.google.com` is ~130ms) For a tool I'm constantly using to check APIs I'm developing, I really appreciate snappy commands that give me results that feel instantaneous.
pdimitar 6y ago
It adds up. I once tried to scrape an internal company website / API because we had no PDF exports and wanted to download + export to PDF, with `httpie`. It's an amazing tool but all the startup times compounded pretty badly. I switched to `curl` (which is a bit more pain until I got the full command line right, granted) and the script finished in ~95 minutes as opposed to the ~202 minutes it took with `httpie`. With about 0.5s startup time, it means every 120 requests add a full minute to the final time. And I had to scrape ~125K URLs back then. For a daily casual flow 0.5s startup time might not be much (although people like myself get irritated by that as well but I do recognize it's a minor inconvenience). But when doing mass-scripting such delays can very easily compound to non-trivial time inefficiencies.
- Scarbutt 6y ago
  To be honest, you approached this problem pretty badly.
  - michaelmrose 6y ago
    This might be a useful comment if you had spent the time to offer thoughts on how it could be better. As it is this comment serves only to gratify your ego whereas advice might help readers. It's worse than adding nothing at all.
  - pdimitar 6y ago
    It was supposed to be a one-off task and I was confident at the time that I can script it quickly. I still scripted it but it took at least half a day. I'll still behind the idea that one has to be able to do one-off tasks without starting a dedicated programming project. It's what scripting languages are meant for. But I did misjudge the speed at which I'll be able to finish the task, that much is true. Ironically I knew exactly what to do from the start but several small and annoying quirks of the shell scripting languages lost me quite a bit of time.
  - killingtime74 6y ago
    Your comment is approached pretty badly.
- dharmab 6y ago
  For mass-scripting I'd prefer to use a native HTTP library with connection pooling.
  - pdimitar 6y ago
    Sure, I can agree with that somewhat. Still, it was an one-off thing and I didn't want to turn it into a project. Using a for loop, `curl`, `wkhtmltopdf` and `parallel` eventually did the job.
    - j0057 6y ago
bschwindHN 6y ago
Because slow startup time is obnoxious for any command-line script. There's no reason to start up an entire scripting virtual machine just to make an HTTP request. No one should be writing serious CLI tools in an interpreted language.
- inshadows 6y ago
  And yet for decades serious CLI tools are being written in POSIX shell, Bash, Zsh, Awk, Tcl, Perl, Ruby, Python, and no one really complained about speed until now, when hardware is so fast, finally people are starting to notice slow startup times??? C'mon. Python is not Java.
  - bschwindHN 6y ago
    I can definitely tell a difference, and it's irritating. The authors of these tools might not notice or care but I actively avoid them. Magic wormhole is one such example.

pdimitar 6y ago

Nice work! As shared down-thread, I really loved and wanted to use `httpie` but the non-trivial amount of startup has put me off. Very happy that you made a Rust alternative because I really don't like `curl` that much -- it requires quite the amount of incantations for non-trivial requests. `ht` and `httpie` definitely improve ergonomics at important places. So, kudos!