Debunking the Erlang and Haskell hype for servers

http://www.codexon.com/posts/debunking-the-erlang-and-haskell-hype-for-servers

by ash • 16 years ago

43 42 16 years ago

rubyrescue• 16 years ago

this guy is incredibly hostile to the commenters.

if you read the whole thing, many from the Erlang community point out that he skews the benchmarks in favor of Python and then will...not...listen when they try to respectfully suggest changes to his tests. it's quite difficult to read all the way to the end but by the end it makes me proud of the Erlang community for the by-and-large mature and respectful way they deal with aggressive and prejudicial attacks.

tel• 16 years ago

On the haskell end, dons politely pointed out that the author's haskell code was far from idiomatic in a benchmark-significant way. The response he got was pretty blindly defensive.

codexon3• 16 years ago

I am the author of this article. Do you not think the commenters are the ones being incredibly hostile?

Here they are on my blog convinced that I am wrong, and when I don't agree, they start calling me epithets like "naive", "stupid", or labeling it as "funny". Let me give you a selection of some of their latest behavior.

- "Then you type some absolutely incoherent stuff about python objects and their state as if anyone still doubted your knowledge level in these matters."

- "And to top it off we get to see a raving “I’m never wrong” lunatic on the Internet."

- "You’re _such_ a dick"

Anyway I don't expect to get a lot of support here since everyone here loves exotic functional languages like Erlang. But I am still not budging from my position.

far33d• 16 years ago

I thought the point of erlang was that it was easier to code for distributed systems, not that it was necessarily faster as a language for simple benchmarks.

cperciva6• 16 years ago

Macrobenchmarks are made up of microbenchmarks.

More seriously, if your code is serially 10x faster, you can grow 10x further before you need to worry about horizontal scaling.

davidw5• 16 years ago

Ok, but the problem is that part of the speed that Erlang is giving up in this benchmark is something you get back, with interest, if you make a more complex system, in terms of programmer time and program complexity. I suppose it's like comparing C with Python. C is simply faster, but you're making a tradeoff because it's slower to code with, generally.

yxhuvud• 16 years ago

Which is true if and only if the problem can be solved at all by a centralized system. This is not true for the major use cases of erlang.

mononcqc• 16 years ago

The main point is usually about reliability and fault-tolerance. Distribution and concurrency are a bit of a lucky side-effect from that (and the standards that were in the telecom world back then).

I'm exaggerating, but distribution came into the language much much later and wasn't exactly a design goal when the language was started as far as I know :)

wingo2• 16 years ago

Upvoted for the "then they fight you" aspect. Fringe language practitioners need to hang together :)

eru4• 16 years ago

Do you include Python in the fringe? It seems that Python has gone quite mainstream recently. I'd still count Erlang and Haskell in the fringe.

wingo2• 16 years ago

I do not include Python in the fringe, no.

asolove• 16 years ago

"Dear the internet, I know that serious companies have used certain cool languages to do amazing things. However, my benchmark of a trivial HTTP server demonstrates that BASIC is still the language of the future."

stcredzero3• 16 years ago

I think there's some unintentional benchmark sleight of hand here. I note that the slope of the first segment for Erlang and Haskell is almost the same as ideal, but Python deviates quite a bit. If I were the author, I'd be curious about this and try to analyze it. I suspect this would reveal something about his benchmark. (Probably that it's too small!)

cperciva6• 16 years ago

The slope is equal to one, i.e., "100% of the incoming connections result in a request being successfully handled".

This is a dumb way to graph performance -- usually people look at either (parallel requests, requests per second) or (requests per second, request latency) -- but he seems to have done it correctly.

stcredzero3• 16 years ago

In the first segment, the slope for Python is not equal to one.

edwtjo• 16 years ago

I don't get it.. He's using select/EPOLL in python but not Haskell/Erlang. I call FUD on this.

cperciva6• 16 years ago

To be fair, he did say that enabling epoll in Erlang had no significant effect on performance.

dons• 16 years ago

It has a pretty huge impact on Haskell, http://www.serpentine.com/bos/files/ghc-event-manager.pdf (See page 5 for the graphs).

codexon3• 16 years ago

Why don't you try it?

Epoll for Haskell was heavily experimental and failed to compile when I wrote the article. Enabling epoll in Erlang changed the results by ~1%.

Maro• 16 years ago

I don't think that many people take these hip Erlang projects seriously =) Sure, a lot of bloggers try out CouchDB, but who cares. These projects are usually not serious enough for money to change hands. Eg. I recently talked to a client who was looking for a distributed database, he couldn't even load his test dataset into CouchDB. Or, a simple 20 line script shows that Riak is 1000x slower to SET data then a C wrapper for BerkeleyDB (Keyspace in this case, but is almost doesn't matter).

jamii• 16 years ago

The majority of the data for the smarkets.com betting exchange is stored in couchdb. Asynchronous calls and cache purges are handled by rabbitmq. The entire backend is written in erlang. This is far from a pet project. Online betting is a highly regulated industry and reliability is key.

moron4hire• 16 years ago

I can haz profile plz? Where is the code spending most of its time? What happens when the responce takes a non-trivial amount of processing?

davidw5• 16 years ago

It'd be interesting to see node.js thrown in there. IMO, it and Scala are likely to be the biggest competitors for some of what Erlang's good at.

evgen2• 16 years ago

Unlikely. They are providing a small amount of competition for the massive-concurrency sweet spot that Erlang accidentally found itself in, but they do not even begin to provide the basics necessary to play in the reliable/fault-tolerant sphere that Erlang well and truly owns. Node and Scala will definitely pick up mindshare as "like Erlang, but easier if you know [Javascript | Java]" but I have a strong suspicion that they are going to end up feeding people _into_ Erlang in the long run.

davidw5• 16 years ago

Like Java feeds people into Smalltalk? My experience is that some pioneering language does things in a certain way, and then mainstream languages borrow enough of that to be an improvement on what's gone before. Maybe a tiny portion go look up what came before, but mostly not really.

"reliable/fault-tolerant sphere that Erlang well and truly owns." - that's not the "some" I was referring to, and it's likely that Erlang will continue to be strong there. However, concurrency is what people are most interested in. People mostly don't care if web apps are as reliable as phone switches, but care a lot about easier models of concurrency.

defen• 16 years ago

The "problem" with node.js is that it's single threaded, so you need to be careful not to block that thread with long-running operations. Erlang has a scheduler built-in so you don't have to deal with that yourself.

davidw5• 16 years ago

Yes, I know that, as I've pointed it out multiple times in the past. Erlang is "better", but, if people writing code for node.js pay attention to how they write code, making the long-running stuff done via callbacks, as they have been doing, it will be "good enough".

j_baker• 16 years ago

I think this is a strawman argument. Of course Haskell and Erlang have features that make them suitable for handling concurrency efficiently. But I'd take fast code in a slow language over slow code in a fast language any day.

That said, the author's core conclusion is correct: "DO NOT WRITE A SERVER IN ERLANG JUST BECAUSE YOU HEARD ERLANG IS THE FASTEST AND MOST CONCURRENT LANGUAGE".

EDIT: Could someone please explain the downmods? Perhaps something I said didn't come off the way I meant it.

codexon3• 16 years ago

EDIT: Could someone please explain the downmods?

Hacker News has a very strong functional language fanbase which you could see last year by the number of Erlang articles, which has then promptly moved onto NodeJS.

Debunking the Erlang and Haskell hype for servers

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