What is interesting here is to compare this one man's effort with "ancient tools" well-researched by two generations of old-school programmers with that amateurish hype and nonsense about node (author publicly stated in his blog that he has no experience with server side development on a POSIX system) and golang - a minimalist approach, carefully crafted by a rigorously trained "professionals". It is not just about KBs and milliseconds.<p>Btw, this "Hello world" example tells a little, basically, how efficiently memory allocation, and IO layer are implemented (that's why no one still could beat nginx).<p>Much more interesting comparison would be of some "real-world scenario", say, "implement an http look up for some public data-set, imported into a <i>persistent</i> local storage, say, Postgresql" and then compare not just throughput rates, but also resource usage.
It's not really written in Common Lisp.<p>"built on top of libev"<p>The lisp part is a thin ffi wrapper on top of lots of C code.<p>Not than an ffi wrapper around C code isn't useful, but it's C code that does all the heavy lifting there.
It makes me really happy to see projects like this for common lisp. I still relatively new to the lisp world but I have fallen in love with the language and development process.
I see so many 'blazing fast' HTTP servers, in every language imaginable. Does anyone write a slow HTTP server any more?<p>The real challenge is in writing a useful, useable server which still stays fast under load. In contrast, you have to be writing terrible coding horrors for your home-grown static file web server <i>NOT</i> to be wire-speed :)<p>(No offence to the writers of this particular server, I haven't looked at the code)
Lately I began to study information security in more detail. Isn't the "code is data" philosophy of common lisp a nightmare for a web server?
One of the greatest barriers to lisp for me is the lack of free IDEs and better tooling. Having cut my teeth in programming using VB, I generally find any language that doesn't come with a GUI builder and a half-decent IDE with intellisense out of the box to be dismal.(Scripting languages is the exception) I really hope someone will improve on the tooling of lisp. I strongly believe in the mantra that you should not do something that the computer the computer can do better, I believe a smart intellisense autocompletion is much better than having to figure out the intricacies of emacs/vim/<insert your favourite editor here>. I really like the syntax of lisp, it would be really sad if I can't be productive with it. :(