Show HN: Tokamak – Server-side framework for Zig

by cztomsik • 2 years ago

109 26 2 years ago

jedisct12• 2 years ago

Looks great! Also TIL about AVA https://github.com/cztomsik/ava

cztomsik7• 2 years ago

thanks :) yeah, ava is my pet project, but there was very little activity lately because I was tight on deadline with another project. I hope to get back to it around next week.

jedisct12• 2 years ago

I love it, especially the Quick Tools tab. Powerful yet easy to use. That's the best LLM UI I've seen so far, and it immediately replaced Private LLM (even though I paid for it).

mbStavola• 2 years ago

I'm not a Zig programmer, but this framework seems pretty nice! Honestly, a lot nicer than I would've expected from a language that explicitly targets lower-level dev[1].

[1]: Rust also has a focus on low-level programming, but has many higher level constructs / a more complicated type system so I'm not too surprised when I see nice web frameworks in that ecosystem

cztomsik7• 2 years ago

I think there are multiple reasons why Zig is great fit for this:

- zig has powerful meta-programming, it's a bit like functional programming with structs. I would consider that high-level concept, at least comparable to traits and constraints

- zig has anytype duck-typing. in any function, you can say that some arg is anytype, and then you can pass anything to it. type-checking still works, because it's done when you actually instantiate the function with known type. this is great for flat and simple API surface.

- server-side code usually have short life-time (request), so you can just use arena for all allocations, and free everything when you finish, this is super-simple to do in zig, because every api accepts allocator if it needs to allocate. rust arenas have lifetimes, which makes them problematic to use/embed deep down in the hiearchy. zig is not aiming for 100% safety so this is easy.

saghm2• 2 years ago

- zig has anytype duck-typing. in any function, you can say that some arg is anytype, and then you can pass anything to it. type-checking still works, because it's done when you actually instantiate the function with known type. this is great for flat and simple API surface.

Is this any different from generics? Rust lets you define arguments with `impl Trait` as a shorthand for a generic type `T: Trait`, but this sounds pretty similar to just defining a function over a generic type `T`, albeit with different syntax.

twarge• 2 years ago

the name tokamak - funny choice! Will barely achieve fusion with an huge and complex implementation. Surely not the intended implicature.

myko• 2 years ago

Any relation to https://github.com/TokamakUI/Tokamak?

timeon• 2 years ago

Why would it? That name is also derived.

latch3• 2 years ago

As a Zig developer with one of the more popular HTTP server libraries around (http.zig), this is impressive and good use of comptime and (good) abuse of Zig's anytype. I'm looking forward to learning from the codebase.

But, it's very slow. A quick test shows Sinatra is about 2x faster. Maybe I'm in the minority, but I feel that a primary reason to give up a GC is for performance.

nine_k• 2 years ago

This is really weird; it's not even obvious how to spend so much time in this code. By any chance, have you tried profiling? Just really curious.

latch3• 2 years ago

Like many http server implementations in Zig, this is a wrapper around `std.http.Server`. `std.http.Server` only exists as a mechanism to test the `std.http.Client` (which is needed for things like, downloading packages). So `std.http.Server` isn't built to be fast, secure or robust.

I believe you _can_ get keepalive working with `std.http.Server`, but it seems like Tokamak isn't using it that way. The implementation is a thread-per-connection. Those are the two most obvious issues specific to this implementation.

But I believe the bulk of the issues relate to `std.http.Server`. It shouldn't be public/used.

Alifatisk• 2 years ago

A quick test shows Sinatra is about 2x faster.

There must be something very wrong

apitman• 2 years ago

Interesting. What mechanism does Zig use to hook up function argument dynamically depending on what is declared in the function (or am I reading that wrong)? Not sure I've ever seen something quite like it.

cztomsik7• 2 years ago

It's using comptime inline for, see https://github.com/cztomsik/tokamak/blob/main/src/injector.z...

ngrilly• 2 years ago

Putting the HTTP method and path directly in the function's name using Zig @-syntax is something I've never seen before. Clever.

clebert• 2 years ago

I love the use of `@hasDecl(root, "mime_types")`. I didn't realize that `@import("root")` was a thing.

https://github.com/cztomsik/tokamak/blob/main/src/mime.zig

Show HN: Tokamak – Server-side framework for Zig

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