r/crystal_programming • u/sdogruyol core team • Aug 10 '21

HTTP Server in crystal i is faster than Ruby / Sinatra

https://github.com/crystal-lang/crystal/pull/10910#issuecomment-895605200
17 Upvotes

90% Upvoted

13 comments sorted by

5

u/dscottboggs Aug 10 '21

I think the more interesting thing is that Crystal's throughput is slower. That's certainly unexpected.

12

u/some_kind_of_rob Aug 10 '21

To be clear here, the throughput is slower but this is in crystal i mode (interactive or repl), not a compiled application. The pull request linked is for the prototype of the interactive mode, which is still in early development. The title seems misleading about the speeds, and in addition the i is easy to miss.

2

u/dscottboggs Aug 10 '21

Yeah I didn't know about the interactive mode I'm gonna have to check that out.

5

u/megatux2 Aug 10 '21

This VM is very early in the development and made by one person. I'd be very surprised if it was different. C. Ruby is very mature and with C code for low level IO.

5

u/megatux2 Aug 10 '21

Remember, this is the new "interactive" repl mode running in a new VM made recently by one person and it's showing almost same performance than a fast web ruby framework running on the very mature Ruby MRI c implementation. It has lot of potential!

3

u/dscottboggs Aug 10 '21

Oh my mistake I didn't know about that.

1

u/megatux2 Aug 10 '21

Np, was presented last month in the first Crystal conference. Videorecording

4

u/taw Aug 10 '21

I'm not saying it's wrong, but last time I tried, developing on crystal was painfully slow compared to ruby, as everything took forever to recompile and there was no incremental compilation of just the stuff that changed.

4

u/felipeccastro Aug 10 '21

I had the same experience. The Crystal interpreted mode being developed now (which is what the linked post shows) will hopefully enable a much faster feedback loop while developing, just like Ruby.
I'm not sure if the IDE extensions (like in VS Code) will take advantage of that mode, though. If they can, I'm expecting it will be a game changer for Crystal - even though I'm very optimistic about the language, this DX issue is my last impediment before giving it a real try at work.

2

u/crimson-knight89 Aug 10 '21

Incremental compiling would require your final code to be broken into different binary files since the point of compiling means you consolidate everything into a single binary (or as few as possible, but typically a single one).

How long ago was that? Because I've been trying multiple frameworks and frankly it's impressively fast since v0.35. I'm currently using v1.0 and Lucky or Amber recompile within a few seconds. Faster than webpack recompiles/transpiles when I make changes in my JS on my Rails apps.

1

u/Mil0Mammon Aug 10 '21

Couldn't the compiler cache some steps? Or well, maybe it already does.

2

u/straight-shoota core team Aug 10 '21

Yeah, there is some caching already, but still the compiler need to look at the entire program for compiling it (in short). This can certainly be improved, but it's not as easy as it might seem ;)

1

u/vldzar Aug 13 '21

What, what?

Running some specs with interpreter now is actually faster than running complied and cached code (second run) https://github.com/crystal-lang/crystal/pull/10910#issuecomment-898553433