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He uses the Hello World code from http://howtonode.org/hello-node http://howtonode.org/hello-node so he did not write the Node version.

by tobik 11y ago

onion2k 11y ago
The point it that he's comparing his TCL code (which is as fast as he could be bothered to make it) to a 'hello world' tutorial that was written as an introduction to Node, not as anything that was designed to demonstrate Node is in any way fast.
- Xophmeister 11y ago
  The 'hello world' example is a good comparator: Presumably the Node developers have optimised the `http` library as much (if not more) than the author's Tcl equivalent. Given that they are therefore doing the same thing, it seems a fair test. Beyond forking new Node processes to handle more requests, I don't think you could make it faster (likewise with the Tcl version). That said, while it's a fair test, I don't think it's a particularly useful one. It would be interesting to see how the two compete when they do something equivalent but non-trivial.
  - graemep 11y ago
    I suspect that for something non-trivial, it will depend on what you are doing. TCL is slow at most things, has fast string manipulation and very fast regular expressions. TCL also makes it easy to write some C to do your heavy lifting, which could be very fast indeed. On the other hand it lacks libraries for async database access etc. It was not meant to be more than a limited test of the TCL event loop and my code.
    - beering 11y ago
      Node's regular expression engine will run circles around almost every other language implementation out there.[0] This is thanks to Google's work on V8.[1] Regexes are, maybe surprisingly, one of the few things that Node is good at. [0] http://benchmarksgame.alioth.debian.org/u32/performance.php?test=regexdna http://benchmarksgame.alioth.debian.org/u32/performance.php?... [1] http://blog.chromium.org/2009/02/irregexp-google-chromes-new-regexp.html http://blog.chromium.org/2009/02/irregexp-google-chromes-new...
      - graemep 11y ago
        I did not know that V8 was that good as regexes. TCL is very fast, but it is quite likely that Node is faster. On the other hand, I think the point that real world performance will depend on the task in hand stands.
      - klibertp 11y ago
        Nothing really surprising here. Regexes are the only way to do more advanced text manipulation in JavaScript, so they're being used far more than in other languages. Lua is similar here, having only a couple most basic string operations built-in and relying on regexes for anything even slightly more advanced. This makes it natural for these languages' implementations to focus heavily on optimizing regexes. Also, regexes are easily JITable and of course implementations having a JIT are going to be much more performant than normal interpreters. This explains the results of your [0] - I didn't check, but I suppose it's a vanilla Lua interpreter and not LuaJIT.

He uses the Hello World code from http://howtonode.org/hello-node http://howtonode.org/hello-node so he did not write the Node version.

by tobik 11y ago

He uses the Hello World code from http://howtonode.org/hello-node http://howtonode.org/hello-node so he did not write the Node version.

onion2k 11y ago

The point it that he's comparing his TCL code (which is as fast as he could be bothered to make it) to a 'hello world' tutorial that was written as an introduction to Node, not as anything that was designed to demonstrate Node is in any way fast.

Xophmeister 11y ago
The 'hello world' example is a good comparator: Presumably the Node developers have optimised the `http` library as much (if not more) than the author's Tcl equivalent. Given that they are therefore doing the same thing, it seems a fair test. Beyond forking new Node processes to handle more requests, I don't think you could make it faster (likewise with the Tcl version). That said, while it's a fair test, I don't think it's a particularly useful one. It would be interesting to see how the two compete when they do something equivalent but non-trivial.
- graemep 11y ago
  I suspect that for something non-trivial, it will depend on what you are doing. TCL is slow at most things, has fast string manipulation and very fast regular expressions. TCL also makes it easy to write some C to do your heavy lifting, which could be very fast indeed. On the other hand it lacks libraries for async database access etc. It was not meant to be more than a limited test of the TCL event loop and my code.
  - beering 11y ago
    Node's regular expression engine will run circles around almost every other language implementation out there.[0] This is thanks to Google's work on V8.[1] Regexes are, maybe surprisingly, one of the few things that Node is good at. [0] http://benchmarksgame.alioth.debian.org/u32/performance.php?test=regexdna http://benchmarksgame.alioth.debian.org/u32/performance.php?... [1] http://blog.chromium.org/2009/02/irregexp-google-chromes-new-regexp.html http://blog.chromium.org/2009/02/irregexp-google-chromes-new...
    - graemep 11y ago
      I did not know that V8 was that good as regexes. TCL is very fast, but it is quite likely that Node is faster. On the other hand, I think the point that real world performance will depend on the task in hand stands.
    - klibertp 11y ago
      Nothing really surprising here. Regexes are the only way to do more advanced text manipulation in JavaScript, so they're being used far more than in other languages. Lua is similar here, having only a couple most basic string operations built-in and relying on regexes for anything even slightly more advanced. This makes it natural for these languages' implementations to focus heavily on optimizing regexes. Also, regexes are easily JITable and of course implementations having a JIT are going to be much more performant than normal interpreters. This explains the results of your [0] - I didn't check, but I suppose it's a vanilla Lua interpreter and not LuaJIT.