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Comment by maccard | Hacker News Reader

I'm afraid it was a while back so I don't have it to hand, but what I do have is the techempower benchmarks [0] which show about a 10x difference between asp.net or go, and all of the js options. I'm not going to claim they're perfect, and would be happy if you could provide some info that supports your argument?

[0] https://www.techempower.com/benchmarks/#section=data-r21

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And yet the top js entry is above all c# and go entries. It takes the top overall on the composite score.

Not that it is representative of actual use cases. Can't use just-js in production as it's hyper optimized for this benchmark rather than a work horse. But it does provide a better view of what is possible if the work is put in.

Isn’t that just basically a js wrapper over a very optimized c++ lib though?

Might call node.js the same thing. Deno has a rust shell and bun is zig.

Just-js had spent a lot of resources optimizing the input and output gateways to the V8 engine and it obviously pays off nicely. It does serve requests with the JS.

Is the boundary in the same place? Not familiar enough with the others to say exactly. But does it really matter?

like bun or node or deno (Rust as well as C++).

in techempower, the vast vast majority of code running in the just-js entry is JavaScript. all the core libraries for networking and interacting with the OS are js wrappers around C++/v8. the http server, though incomplete and not production rady, is written in javascript, with http parsing handed off to picohttpparser. the postgres wire protocol is completely written in javascript. in fact, one of the advantages JS and other JIT languages have is you can optimize away a lot of unnecessary logic at run time when you need to. e.g. https://github.com/just-js/libs/blob/main/pg/pg.js#L241

the whole point of doing this was to prove that JS can be as fast as any other language for most real world web serving scenarios.

if i had more time to work on it, i am sure i could improve the fortunes score where it would be at or very close to the top of that ranking too.

JavaScript is ranked 5th on the ranking you linked to.

4 ranks before .Net.

I was hesitant as to how much I should go into this because you get into the semantics of the benchmark but this [0] thread goes into why - that particular implementation doesn't behave the same way as the other implementations, it uses a different db driver that doesn't synchronise, which won't be allowed in the next version of the benchmarks. Techempower publish regular snapshots of their benchmarks at [1], and if you look at any of the snapshots that aren't the last published set where the discrepancy was fixed you'll see that all of the js implementations lag far far behind.

[0] https://github.com/TechEmpower/FrameworkBenchmarks/issues/72...

[1] https://tfb-status.techempower.com/

Are you sure about your conclusion though? Apart from just-js missing in action in last 3 runs, here it's just fine

https://www.techempower.com/benchmarks/#section=test&runid=e...

they upgraded postgres recently and it uses a different default authentication mechanism which broke just-js. they seem to have stopped doing runs right now so just-js should re-appear when they start again.

i'm sorry but this is not true. postgres pipelining is not allowed in the benchmarks any more, and even when it was, just-js was completely compliant with the rules and it was other C++, PHP, Rust and C# frameworks that were non compliant.

the postgres driver was rewritten in JS because i spent so long benchmarking using the pg C driver and couldn't get the performance i needed from it. if you actually read the github thread you can see i even did a lot of work to verify the various frameworks were compliant with the requirements.

in round 21, postgres pipelining was disallowed for all frameworks and just-js/JavaScript is in first place. \o/

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

Just-js is not really a Javascript: https://github.com/just-js/just. .Net in that list much closer to what everyone assumes.Net is.

Looks like Javascript to me

https://github.com/TechEmpower/FrameworkBenchmarks/tree/mast...

https://just.billywhizz.io/blog/

it is! people who love bashing JavaScript always come up with this line that just-js "is not JavaScript". ¯\_(ツ)_/¯

Oh, come on! I am in fact a front end developer. And when I saw the result first time a few years ago, I was surprised and wanted to use this “just JS”, but the reality was quite far from what I was expecting. It might look like JS, but if you check the source code of the app for the benchmark, you’ll realise that it looks more like C or C++.

More details in this thread: https://github.com/just-js/just/issues/5

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