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Unfounded claims, no research, nothing. After years of suffering websites running on JVM web stacks, I am very sceptic of this Scala for the web rant. Plus he e

by alecco 18y ago

Unfounded claims, no research, nothing. After years of suffering websites running on JVM web stacks, I am very sceptic of this Scala for the web rant. Plus he extrapolates Ruby to Python and PHP just because. The JVMs (there are several) mostly trade-off memory for speed. Go check the Language Shootout page. It doesn't scale in my book. So unless Scala has some secret ingredient to use the JVM more efficiently, this looks to me as yet another fanboy rant.

rcoder 18y ago
First of all, I don't think it's fair to accuse the Twitter dev team of working without real experience and numbers to back up their decisions. They have a huge volume of data being generated by their service, and have weathered the whole "Rails doesn't scale" flame-fest with relative grace and good humor. IMHO, that entitles them to talk fairly freely about the relative scalability of different languages and frameworks. Secondly, any "ranting" you hear in this article is the product of El Reg, not Alex. He mostly offered a calm, positive presentation about the improved speed (with relatively little, if any, tradeoff in developer productivity) that came from using Scala instead of Ruby for critical infrastructure services. Regardless, most Java web applications' performance issues stem from framework-itis, not from the underlying runtime. By itself, Tomcat (or another modern Java servlet container) is capable of some pretty impressive throughput -- perhaps not on par with a lean, pure C server like nginx, but not nearly as limited in functionality and extensibility, either. No matter what you think about Java the language, you at least have to admit that HotSpot blows MRI, YARV, the Python VM, and Parrot out of the water when it comes to raw performance on low-level code. That doesn't save you from bad implementation ideas, but it does at least give you the possibility of getting fast, efficient code, if you have a decent compiler and work fairly close to the metal. Using Scala is one way to produce that sort of low-level implementation code without wanting to gouge your eyes out (which is how most Java source tends to make me feel, anyway).
- alecco 18y ago
  No, the JVMs use memory like crazy themselves, it's not just the frameworks. As I said, check out the Language Shootout. Java, in almost every test, is several times bigger than most other languages. The rest of your comment, you change what I said so it's not worth addressing.
axod 18y ago
Java scales just fine thanks. FWIW, Mibbit handles a good number more messages per day that twitter. On a single VPS with 1.4GB ram, running Java.
- alecco 18y ago
  > Java scales just fine thanks. FWIW, Mibbit handles a good number more messages > per day that twitter. On a single VPS with 1.4GB ram, running Java. I wasn't talking about that. Message passing is trivial and scale on any language, or at least it should be. Well, unless you do Java and XML. That doesn't scale, from experience. Unless something changed in the last couple of years I'm not aware of. (Just taking your red herring further, to show it doesn't make sense and it has nothing to do with what I said.) Third time lucky, I hope. My point is I seriously doubt Scala is much better at scaling than Ruby, Python, or PHP. And the author seems to have based his opinion on his experience refactoring Twitter components previously coded in Ruby in Scala. Caveat emptor, I wasn't at the conference and this rant is second hand via a questionable source, The Register.
  - cosmo7 18y ago
    > My point is I seriously doubt Scala is much better at scaling than Ruby I spoke with some people at Twitter the other day. They said that they were switching to Scala just to annoy alecco on Hacker News. The performance and scaling advantages are entirely negligible.
ewjordan 18y ago
Careful here: are you _really_ suggesting that Twitter would do a full rewrite without making sure that it would increase throughput first? I don't get the sense that they are that inexperienced. If they think a switch to Scala will handle more volume, I'd be really shocked if they didn't have some solid evidence to back that up.
- alecco 18y ago
  > Careful here: are you _really_ suggesting that Twitter would do a full rewrite > without making sure that it would increase throughput first? No. I say this Scala vs. Ruby/Python/PHP rant sounds farfetched and unfounded.

by alecco 18y ago

rcoder 18y ago

First of all, I don't think it's fair to accuse the Twitter dev team of working without real experience and numbers to back up their decisions. They have a huge volume of data being generated by their service, and have weathered the whole "Rails doesn't scale" flame-fest with relative grace and good humor. IMHO, that entitles them to talk fairly freely about the relative scalability of different languages and frameworks. Secondly, any "ranting" you hear in this article is the product of El Reg, not Alex. He mostly offered a calm, positive presentation about the improved speed (with relatively little, if any, tradeoff in developer productivity) that came from using Scala instead of Ruby for critical infrastructure services. Regardless, most Java web applications' performance issues stem from framework-itis, not from the underlying runtime. By itself, Tomcat (or another modern Java servlet container) is capable of some pretty impressive throughput -- perhaps not on par with a lean, pure C server like nginx, but not nearly as limited in functionality and extensibility, either. No matter what you think about Java the language, you at least have to admit that HotSpot blows MRI, YARV, the Python VM, and Parrot out of the water when it comes to raw performance on low-level code. That doesn't save you from bad implementation ideas, but it does at least give you the possibility of getting fast, efficient code, if you have a decent compiler and work fairly close to the metal. Using Scala is one way to produce that sort of low-level implementation code without wanting to gouge your eyes out (which is how most Java source tends to make me feel, anyway).

alecco 18y ago
No, the JVMs use memory like crazy themselves, it's not just the frameworks. As I said, check out the Language Shootout. Java, in almost every test, is several times bigger than most other languages. The rest of your comment, you change what I said so it's not worth addressing.

axod 18y ago

Java scales just fine thanks. FWIW, Mibbit handles a good number more messages per day that twitter. On a single VPS with 1.4GB ram, running Java.

alecco 18y ago
> Java scales just fine thanks. FWIW, Mibbit handles a good number more messages > per day that twitter. On a single VPS with 1.4GB ram, running Java. I wasn't talking about that. Message passing is trivial and scale on any language, or at least it should be. Well, unless you do Java and XML. That doesn't scale, from experience. Unless something changed in the last couple of years I'm not aware of. (Just taking your red herring further, to show it doesn't make sense and it has nothing to do with what I said.) Third time lucky, I hope. My point is I seriously doubt Scala is much better at scaling than Ruby, Python, or PHP. And the author seems to have based his opinion on his experience refactoring Twitter components previously coded in Ruby in Scala. Caveat emptor, I wasn't at the conference and this rant is second hand via a questionable source, The Register.
- cosmo7 18y ago
  > My point is I seriously doubt Scala is much better at scaling than Ruby I spoke with some people at Twitter the other day. They said that they were switching to Scala just to annoy alecco on Hacker News. The performance and scaling advantages are entirely negligible.

ewjordan 18y ago

Careful here: are you _really_ suggesting that Twitter would do a full rewrite without making sure that it would increase throughput first? I don't get the sense that they are that inexperienced. If they think a switch to Scala will handle more volume, I'd be really shocked if they didn't have some solid evidence to back that up.

alecco 18y ago
> Careful here: are you _really_ suggesting that Twitter would do a full rewrite > without making sure that it would increase throughput first? No. I say this Scala vs. Ruby/Python/PHP rant sounds farfetched and unfounded.