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Comment by fiddlerwoaroof | Hacker News Reader

Those might be bad, but comparing rust compiled to web assembly vs. JavaScript is much worse here

I'll assume you're right but can someone with more knowledge of why explain this? I get the whole compiled vs JS's event loop stuff but I've never worked with edge computing so I don't really understand the details of what matters here in the full stack of a request.

From my limited research in the past for web servers JS is not that far behind Rust. In fact they often rank better. For this "single query" JS (just-js) ranks 1st with a rust one at 3rd:

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

for "fortunes" requests JS is 5th place with Rust at 2nd and 4th:

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

etc, but again not sure how relevant this is

I am guessing warming up, i.e. JIT?

FYI, just-js is a js runtime specifically built for beating techempower benchmark. It is not for general use case.

The issue I have is that, if you’re claiming to test the performance of Cloudflare workers vs. Fastly’s similar service and, especially, if you’re going to write a blogpost about the statistical issues with Cloudflare’s benchmarks, you really should do your best to make the only difference the platform. So either JavaScript on both or rust on both so it’s obvious that the language and runtime aren’t the source of performance differences.

That sounds like the most reasonable take

At the time this was going down, cloudflare had web assembly and fastly didn't.

Fastly's complaint is "we don't offer the fast runtime so its unfair that you point out that you have a faster option while claiming you have a faster option."

Fastly’s compute at edge has always been based on WASM… there have been some pretty interesting talks by Tyler McMullen, their CTO about it

Cloudflare used JS for edge workers as their launch choice, and Fastly used Rust as their launch choice so of course it makes sense to compare the two most mature techs in their stacks

The funny side point here is this is two unprofitable CDNs squabbling while the unfashionable Akamai just keeps making money — an interesting case of first mover advantage

First mover advantage has mostly been debunked as a strategy, the history of tech startups is littered with mildly successful first movers (Friendster being the classic go-to anecdote) that later gets dominated by 1-2 tech companies who do it better.

Akamai's advantage is probably it's sales business and existing contracts. Workers is just business #1383 for Cloudflare which can take advantage of their freemium scaling model

So if first mover advantage has been debunked why is Akamai not only the largest CDN by sales but also the only profitable one too?

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