Zap – Fast backends in Zig

https://github.com/zigzap/zap

by jedisct1 • 3 years ago

138 59 3 years ago

github.com

idiomaticrust• 3 years ago

Faster than axum? Nice!

dralley2• 3 years ago

Keep in mind that microbenchmarks aren't necessarily representative of production performance.

* Some webservers "cheat" and skip a lot of request headers which one may want to use in a production scenario to get better numbers.

* Some web server architectures can do very well on many small uniformly sized requests but poorly on a mixture of request sizes.

* Some web server architectures can get very good average latency but poor p99 latency.

* Some benchmarking tools don't measure correctly: https://medium.com/@siddontang/the-coordinated-omission-prob...

etc.

giovannibonetti2• 3 years ago

The benchmarks only include throughput, not latency (P50, P95, P99), which are quite important.

AugustoCAS• 3 years ago

In what industries is Zig popular? I'm asking as I saw Zig as being the 'highest' paid language on the 2023 Stack Overflow Dev survey - https://survey.stackoverflow.co/2023/#section-salary-salary-...

The performance looks outstanding!

csjh• 3 years ago

It's still pretty early on, but it's aim is to be a C successor I believe. Main example of usage off the top of my head is for bun.sh

itake• 3 years ago

how is that different from rust? or is rust a cpp successor?

srgpqt• 3 years ago

Zig is still rather new, but it would be a good alternative to C, C++, Rust and Go.

dontlaugh2• 3 years ago

The first three, but not Go.

bsder2• 3 years ago

Zig is mostly a good alternative to C.

If Rust or C++ are possible options, Zig probably isn't what you really want. Rust is especially good if you can keep everything in Rust and make the most of the ecosystem.

I like Zig, but it is a much smaller language that C++ or Rust with more than a few very, very sharp edges. That having been said, I reach for Zig in a lot more instances than I thought I would. I write a lot of relatively small programs that I want to work on Linux/Windows/macOS, and Zig is pretty good at that.

Of course, I miss Rust terribly every time I run a Zig program and get a segfault.

zengid• 3 years ago

I was wondering this exact thing! Who's out there getting paid to write Zig?

e4m2• 3 years ago

The core Zig devs, TigerBeetle and Bun are the main ones AFAIK. The latter two are VC backed, the Zig Software Foundation is a 501(c)(3).

jedisct16• 3 years ago

Zig is very popular for WebAssembly: https://wasm4.org/blog/jam-2-results/

Aransentin2• 3 years ago

My company uses Zig to write software for small Linux devices, such as set-top boxes.

The biggest benefit isn't exactly performance, but the absurdly tiny binaries it produces (very convenient if you are working with small flash disks!), and how the Zig standard library doesn't depend on anything other than the kernel, which means you can often entirely ignore all library issues; more often than not our software 'just works' when built for some new customer platform even though I've never even targeted that environment (or even CPU architecture) before.

bryancoxwell• 3 years ago

If you don’t mind me asking, how long has your company been using Zig in production?

littlestymaar3• 3 years ago

the performance looks outstanding!

Well, given that in their benchmark Go ends up Boeing almost an order of magnitude raster than Rust, I wouldn't trust their benchmarking methodology too much.

fransje26• 3 years ago

Wasn't Uber using Zig? At least for it's cross-compiler features, if I recall properly.

jedisct16• 3 years ago

Yes, Uber use Zig: https://www.uber.com/en-FR/blog/bootstrapping-ubers-infrastr...

generichuman• 3 years ago

Wraps the C library https://facil.io/. I hope they port it & go pure Zig at some point.

detrites• 3 years ago

Are there advantages to this other than, I guess it being convenient? (Zig noob here.)

Eg, are there C to Zig ports that have had a demonstrable performance or memory-safety gain or something like that?

(Specifically, I mean over a C-lib wrapper compiled using Zig, as matching this case.)

jedisct16• 3 years ago

The Zig compiler itself is a good example: https://kristoff.it/blog/zig-self-hosted-now-what/

"The new self-hosted compiler reduces memory usage 3x compared to the old C++ implementation"

ledgerdev• 3 years ago

Seeing this, and the use of zig for https://github.com/tigerbeetledb/tigerbeetle I wonder if zig might become a good tradeoff vs rust for servers if in long term it's more readable and maintainable and with a different approach to quality.

I would also be interested to hear the compile time, binary size and memory usage of those example apps.

Looks like the underlying facil.io library hasn't seen any commits since 2021, so that's a bit of a red flag. https://github.com/boazsegev/facil.io

jorangreef• 3 years ago

Thanks, we did a podcast interview this past Sunday on TigerBeetle, also looking at safety as a philosophy (beyond what any language can provide), that I hope you enjoy: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=0pHHb6ONTbw

Thaxll• 3 years ago

Does Zap add the datetime in every http response as header because Go does it and those are syscalls so it reduces performance.

fluffyspork• 3 years ago

Nice to see someone else thinks about this.

In my personal project webserver I don't. I didn't measure, but just trying not to do unnecessary work.

memefrog2• 3 years ago

That shouldn't reduce performance too much, right? Getting the current time is such a frequently-executed system call that, as far as I understand, its implementation is in a vDSO in Linux that is loaded into every process. This means you shouldn't need the full cost of a system call when you get the current time.

faraggi• 3 years ago

What a wasted opportunity to call it zag.

ARandomerDude2• 3 years ago

Zap sounds fast and active, which is definitely a goal of the project.

Zag sounds like it's inefficient.

Solvency• 3 years ago

Rust sounds like something old and crusty. No one will ever adopt a language called Ru...

corentin88• 3 years ago

How does it compete with Node.js? The benchmark (req/s) compares Zap with Rust, Go, etc. But I don't see any mention of Node.js.

giovannibonetti2• 3 years ago

Node.js should be way slower, given that JS is an interpreted language and the others aren't.

jedisct16• 3 years ago

Not really. All modern JS engines, including V8 that Node uses, include excellent JIT compilers.

Also, HTTP serving in Node uses code written in C, not JS.

That being said, Node is slow compared to Bun: https://bun.sh

adamrezich2• 3 years ago

wow, I had not heard of facil.io (the thing this is based on)—I'll have to give both of these a look, as I'm working on something conceptually similar. neat!

jedisct16• 3 years ago

Facebook's Proxygen is also pretty neat: https://github.com/facebook/proxygen

adamrezich2• 3 years ago

interesting! I was looking for stuff like this awhile back when I started my project and couldn't find anything—I probably was using the wrong search terms.

my goal is to create a simple web framework that produces a single compiled executable, but I don't want to care too much about the HTTP(S) server portion, if possible. I have a functioning prototype, but the wrote-it-myself-and-it-shows HTTP server part sucks, so, hopefully I can find something to replace it with, instead of diving deep and writing something like this on my own.

andrewmatte2• 3 years ago

Congratulations! This is really great. I am going to try it.

In your benchmarks, consider adding actix which is also in Rust but considerably faster than rust axum according to: https://www.techempower.com/benchmarks/#section=data-r21&tes...

andrewmatte2• 3 years ago

There might also be a chance you can have your webserver included in the techempower benchmarks for their next round. Their code is submitted by experts and open-source: https://github.com/TechEmpower/FrameworkBenchmarks

dralley2• 3 years ago

Techempower benchmarks are not a good measure of real-world performance. Everyone cheats on them, they don't do a great job of matching realistic workloads, and there's plenty of unresolved issues filed about methodology problems.

Actix also used to be the poster child for overly focusing on benchmark performance at the expense of real world concerns.

LAC-Tech• 3 years ago

Very cool - this is a big missing piece in the zig ecosystem. Wish the project all the best.

pjmlp2• 3 years ago

Are they also blazingly fast producing CVEs?

Given the current state of use-after-free and similar issues.

Zap – Fast backends in Zig

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