fastest scripting programming language? [closed]

Question

I have a web application project where performances count more than anything else, and I have the choice of the technologies to use.

The language shootout benchmarks that are not really related to web applications.

What would you recommand as the best suitable candidates?

Thanks!

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A friend suggested the gwan server on IRC. Looks to be what I was searching but I never heard about it before. Anybody with prior experience on this package? Ease of use, reliability?

Before I leave Apache, I would like to get your thoughts.

Answer 1

G-WAN is a neat webserver: it's based around the "C scripts" concept:

A C script is simply C source-code that is compiled by the webserver and then loaded in protected memory. It will get called by the webserver when a request to the servlet is made. The servlet, as it's compiled by a C compiler, is "as fast" as normally compiling a C program. However, the advantage of C scripts to, for instance, CGI or FastCGI, is that the compiled program is in the same memory space as the webserver. This reduces the overhead of communication (either by creating a process, in the case of CGI, for each request, or the socket for FastCGI).

The webserver is using the select/poll technique: non-blocking I/O. However, there's a neat thing to it. Every program can be written as if it was using blocking I/O. As the webserver itself compiles each C script, it can transform the program to use non-blocking I/O. As of this, it can link itself to third-party libraries (like database access) and still make use of the non-blocking I/O nature: no thread/process context switching.

The tools provided for programming the C scripts are, for instance, caching and safe buffers. The next (not yet released as of writing this post) version will also include a Key-Value store.

Performance-wise: there are some benchmarks available showing it's outperforming any other webserver, however I don't trust these. Try writing a small CPU intensive program in C and in, for instance, PHP. Let the C script run on G-WAN and the PHP script on Apache, and do a benchmark yourself.

There is more to it, but that's out of scope for this question.

Some downsides of G-WAN is that it is developed by only one person. There is a forum, however, where you can ask questions.

Ease of use is limited by your skill in C. The API provided, however, is simple. It still has some inconsistencies and (in my opinion) ugly parts, but that's not a problem. A more serious problem is that each version is not guaranteed to be backwards-compatible and you may have to rewrite.

If you want to be safe: make use of C's platform independentness: allow your code to be compiled to (Fast)CGI programs and also to be used by G-WAN. Might G-WAN fail, you can always fallback to Apache's (Fast)CGI (see http://www.fastcgi.com/ for API's).