It makes perfect sense to me. What would you have recommended them, for a reasonably-high-performance server implementation? (Please don't say C.)
https://benchmarksgame.alioth.debian.org/u64q/benchmark.php?...
Yes. Other than some very basic scripts, I have never worked with Ruby, so I was not aware that it is so slow. Thanks for pointing that out.
As for my recommendation, it is pretty standard worker architecture:
Their system seems to be an ingesting-only system, that is, the clients are getting an empty HTTP 200 OK response. Given this, I would put openresty (nginx) in the front, with some trivial Lua code[1] to en-queue payloads to beanstalkd. Then, you can either have your workers inside openresty (using Openresty timers) or have them as separate processes and written in the language of choice. We have been using this for a couple of years now and it is working really well for our use case, also an ingesting-only system.
[1] https://github.com/smallfish/lua-resty-beanstalkd/blob/maste...
That may be true for some types of code, but for an app that's predominantly shuffling data over the network you should be spending most of the time in kernel space executing syscalls, and then language differences are largely irrelevant.
> and much easier to write concurrent code in.
How? Writing concurrent code in Ruby is trivial since 1.9.x (prior to 1.9 you had to battle the green threads in MRI for some stuff), which isn't exactly new.
Than MRI Ruby you mean.
The advantage wouldn't be as much if Ruby designers cared to add AOT compilation in the same vein as Dylan or Common Lisp to the canonical implementation.
> Than MRI Ruby you mean.
Given the nature of orders-of-magnitude comparisons and the lack of Ruby implementations that are even one order of magnitude faster than MRI, "...than Ruby" is reasonably accurate if "...than MRI Ruby" is at all accurate.
> The advantage wouldn't be as much if Ruby designers cared to add AOT compilation in the same vein as Dylan or Common Lisp to the canonical implementation.
Maybe, though that's unproven. AFAIK, actual Ruby implementations with AOT only seem to gain about a factor of 2 improvement, not an order of magnitude.
You could have written this in any number of languages. I don't know why go is more logical than say Java JavaScript.