hello-webserver

Basic web server implementations in a variety of languages.

The numbers given below are rough and not hard science. They are meant mostly to demonstrate to myself the PROs and CONs of the approaches offered by each language / framework.

Binary Sizes

Final sizes of optimized, stripped release binaries:

	Hello World	JSON	Database
Haskell (Wai)	2.0mb	2.5mb	3.5mb
Haskell (Servant)	2.2mb	2.7mb
Haskell (Yesod)	3.2mb	3.6mb
Rust (Hyper)	1.6mb	1.7mb
Rust (Warp)	1.6mb	1.8mb
Rust (Tide)	1.3mb	1.4mb	1.5mb
Rust (Actix)	3.1mb	3.5mb	3.3mb
Go	5.2mb	5.5mb	7.8mb
Go (Gin)	12mb	12mb

Notes:

• Haskell: The key to small binary sizes is the following in your stack.yaml:

ghc-options:
  $everything: -split-sections

• Rust: Warp is built on top of Hyper. Upgrading to Warp adds around 100 dependencies, and yet most of that weight seems to fade away with lto = true and strip.
• Go: Passing -ldflags="-s -w" or just running strip have the same effect and don't compound.

Code Length

All values are "significant lines of code", so blank lines and comments are not included. No attempt at code-golfing to achieve smaller sizes was done.

	Hello World	JSON	Database
Haskell (Wai)	13	53	49
Haskell (Servant)	13	41
Haskell (Yesod)	12	43
Rust (Hyper)	18	66
Rust (Warp)	6	39
Rust (Tide)	7	42	69
Rust (Actix)	12	45	73
Go	13	53	83
Go (Gin)	10	47

Performance

Throughput via the JSON and Database servers.

The numbers below are rough measurements. The code is idiomatic, and no attempts at hand-optimization nor profiling have been done. This should give a fair view of "off-the-shelf" performance.

Throughput testing was done with vegeta.

• Throughput: Higher is better.
• Values in parens for Haskell are when +RTS -A64M -H1G is given, altering the GC behaviour of the runtime.

	JSON Throughput	Database Throughput
Haskell (Wai)	10351 (15142)	11187 (12851)
Haskell (Servant)	9438 (13539)
Haskell (Yesod)	5422 (6859)
Rust (Hyper)	27703
Rust (Warp)	23808
Rust (Tide)	17032	15336
Rust (Actix)	24238	20422
Go	18349	13338
Go (Gin)	18274

Notes:

• Haskell: By default Yesod prints a lot of log messages to the console, so that probably affected performance. It isn't clear how to turn them off.
• Rust: rusqlite holds an internal cache of prepared statements which is free to use with no extra code. Without it, throughput is about equal to Go.
• Go: Gin code is a bit shorter, but balloons the binary size without offering better performance. Decoding the timestamp from SQLite must be done by hand.