web development in D

[Vladimir Panteleev]

On Sun, 22 May 2011 20:10:07 +0300, Adam D. Ruppe  
<destructionator at gmail.com> wrote:

> Vladimir Panteleev wrote:
>> Regular CGI still has the overhead of starting a new process for
>> every request.
>
> That's a very small cost - between 1 and 5 milliseconds, depending
> on your hardware.
>
> Next to the network latency involved in making a request, that's
> literally nothing - it's less than random network variation, so it
> has no impact on the end user experience.

Yes, of course - the difference is negligible if the server load is low.  
But if your website is getting enough hits to generate more requests than  
the server can process, technology choice matters a lot.

> It also disappears quickly if your program does any processing,
> since it's like a line: y = mx + b. The startup cost is b, and
> the speed of the language is m.

Yes, I should have added that I meant for very simple requests. The speed  
advantage of a compiled language will always overtake most initialization  
overheads for non-trivial requests.

> The end result depends on your app. Only actually benchmarking it
> can tell for sure what matters. My cgi.d provides the same interface
> regardless of how it is called - switching to built in httpd is
> easy if needed.

Is there any reason you didn't go for FastCGI or SCGI? The main advantage  
I can see is that CGI is much simpler for edit-compile-test iterations.

>> I've had great experience with using an HTML/jQuery frontend with
>> a D backend
>
> From what I've seen in my benchmarks, you would probably get
> a bigger usability boost by ditching jQuery than by ditching CGI.
> Even when cached, jQuery takes a while for the browser to parse -
> comparable to starting up a native process on the server.

The difference here is that HTML, CSS and jQuery will only be loaded once.  
I was talking about AJAX web-apps.

-- 
Best regards,
  Vladimir                            mailto:vladimir at thecybershadow.net