Ntex: Powerful, pragmatic, fast framework for composable networking services

by daureg • 2 years ago

40 10 2 years ago

jitl2• 2 years ago

Is it any good? Why pick this versus other options? I poked around the docs and didn’t find any ecosystem comparison discussion.

minimaxir• 2 years ago

ntex was formed after a schism in actix-web (https://actix.rs) and Rust safety/unsafety, with ntex allowing more unsafe code for better performance.

ntex is at the top of the TechEmpower benchmarks and beats most other Rust frameworks, although those benchmarks are not apples-to-apples since each uses its own tricks to eek out more performance: https://www.techempower.com/benchmarks/#hw=ph&test=fortune&s...

cstrahan• 2 years ago

I can't speak to the "is it any good" part, but (after a bit of research) I can share what I've found. I'll try to represent things as best as I understand, but I may have some finer details mixed up.

ntex is written by the same person that started actix-web, Nikolay Kim (fafhrd91 on GitHub). There was a bunch of drama a while back due to actix-web using (what many reasoned to be) avoidable unsafe code, which was later found to be buggy. Nikolay was pilloried online, resulting in him transferring leadership of actix-web to someone else. ntex is, as I understand it, essentially Nikolay picking back up on his ideals for what could have been actix-web, if people hadn't pushed him out of his own project.

How ntex compares to the pre-/post-leadership change of actix-web, I don't know.

Here are some jumping points if you want more of the backstory.

https://www.theregister.com/2020/01/21/rust_actix_web_framew...

https://steveklabnik.com/writing/a-sad-day-for-rust

https://github.com/actix/actix-web/issues/1289

https://github.com/fafhrd91/actix-web-postmortem

jitl2• 2 years ago

Thanks, very helpful context

User23• 2 years ago

What are "composable networking services?"

est• 2 years ago

Looks like some kind of http/tls server

FridgeSeal2• 2 years ago

Starting ntex v0.5 async runtime must be selected as a feature. Available options are glommio, tokio or async-std.

Ooohhh it has Glommio support! Very cool! A very cool runtime that deserves more attention/package support.

paulddraper• 2 years ago

What's very cool about it?

FridgeSeal2• 2 years ago

Thread-per-core style, with executors pinned to cores/core-regions. IO_URING and DirectIO support, and a bunch of nice utilities to make working with the thread-per-core style and sharding easy, including a neat utility to automatically mesh all your executors together with incoming outgoing channels.

grok22• 2 years ago

Since when has the broad term "networking" started referring to just Web protocols? Can I use this to build any random server (like, say, an FTP server) that provides services over the network? Skimming the docs, it doesn't seem like it.

Ntex: Powerful, pragmatic, fast framework for composable networking services

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