Benchmarking in the web age
The TechEmpower website contains some fascinating benchmarks of servers. The results on this benchmark of multiple requests to servers provide some insight into the performance characteristics of .NET on a modern problem. Specifically, the C# on ASP.NET Core solutions range from 2.5-80× slower than fastest solution which is written in Rust. In fact, C# is beaten by the following programming languages in order: Rust Java Kotlin Go C Perl Clojure PHP C++ Furthermore, .NET Core is Microsoft's new improved and faster version of .NET aimed specifically at these kinds of tasks. So why is it beaten by all those languages? I suspect that a large part of this is the change in workload from the kind of number crunching .NET was designed for to a modern string-heavy workload and I suspect .NET's GC isn't as optimised for this as the JVM is. As we have found, .NET has really poor support for JSON compared to other languages and frameworks, with support fragmented across many non-stand...