fastest scripting programming language? [closed]

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

T开发者_高级运维he 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.

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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).

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If performance counts more than anything else, don't use a scripting language. Especially since you have full control over the technology stack. Compiled languages will perform better for CPU intensive operations.

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LuaJit (Lua) is the fastest scripting language with JIT technology..

if you want the fastest for server side web application (that not always scripting), that would be g-wan.. you can use c, c++, java..

ASP.NET is also fast enough for almost anything, but quite pricey

php with hiphop would be easiest to learn and also fast enough..

it depends on how many request do you need.. and how fast you learn the language ^^ don't forget to cache static data (using memcache or nosql)

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Begin by identifying if your application performance really depends on the language or on some other factor (like database requests for instance). Ability to cache results can also be a very important factor.

For performance the language used come quite far in the list of important points to check and the use case also influence which language is better. For example if you have many regex to check you should check regex support in the candidate language, etc...

For image processing, the most important point will probably be the underlying image library you use, usually written in C. I have the case of ImageMagick in mind, because I'm currently using it. It's available for as a library for most languages and the scripting language layer is only necessary to call functions of the library and used language at that level won't change much (but caching precomputed result images could change performance by a large margin). This use case would probably be similar for calling a cryptographic lib.

If performance is really such an issue, for image processing you could also consider using a lib that works with GPU accelerator cards (libs with cuda or openGPU support).

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Javascript is constantly being scrutinized and optimized for use on mobile devices, so on actual full-size servers it runs EXTREMELY fast. Check out Node.JS, a project for implementing server side javascript to serve webpages: http://nodejs.org/

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Well, if you use a database with a large volume of data you will spend more time there than running a php or asp or (insert other flavours here) script
If you can you should build a mockup of your app (or at least a segment of the more database or processor-intensive parts) and try to benchmark those

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Update: Seem like Java 7 using NIO.2 has manage to outperform Gwan using C but almost 2x in timing, it is incredible but you can a few a simple tests.

The only downside of Java is not able to integrate shared libraries built on C. I'm ready to challenge someone to prove me wrong that Java NIO.2 is slower than C.

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I recommend the Java programming language; it's not a scripting language, but it's probably the fastest programming language that can be used for programming web applications. I also recommend using a framework like Spring for a better programming experience (versus "raw" Java Servlet Programming).

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The fasted scripting Language is ASP followed by PHP, but if you want applications that scale to unlimited speeds, use C++ or Java. Google Search uses C++ Gmail uses Java YouTube = Python Twiiter used to use Ruby now they shifted to Java Facebook = PHP at front end and some java at the backend

But i recommend PHP at the front end and C++ at the back-end