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The future of back-end development (lemm.ee)

submitted 1 year ago by iByteABit@lemm.ee to c/programming@programming.dev

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What are your opinions on the future of back-end web development? Is the Java ecosystem going to wither away as more modern and better solutions are emerging and maturing?

If so, which language/framework and/or programming paradigm do you think will become the new dominant player and how soon?

Personally I would love to see Rust becoming a new standard, it's a pleasure to write and has a rapidly growing ecosystem, I don't think it's far away from overtaking Java. The biggest hurdle imo is big corporations taking a pretty big risk by choosing a relatively new language that's harder to learn compared to what has been the standard for decades.

Playing it safe means you minimize surprises and have a very large amount of people that are already experts in the language.

Taking the risk will definitely improve a lot of things given that you find enough people that know or are willing to learn Rust, but it also means that you're trading off Java flaws with Rust flaws. That's the case however with every big change, and Java flaws are a good enough reason to make a big change.

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[–] mark@programming.dev 2 points 1 year ago* (last edited 1 year ago) (6 children)

Yeah, JavaScript/TS doesn't get a great rep being used on the backend. But I use it on quite a few of my projects, one of which gets thousands of requests per minute. I was skeptical of whether or not using Node on the backend would hold up, but the performance has been stellar.. pretty surprising, actually.

[–] sine@programming.dev 2 points 1 year ago* (last edited 1 year ago) (2 children)

Thousands of requests per minute can mean many things so maybe you're referring to several hundred requests per minute, but one of our services at work gets 300 requests/second which is ~18K requests per minute and it's really not that much. We're using pretty cheap cloud services. Even thrice the traffic is pretty much a slow walk for your average production-grade web framework.

Web frameworks are built to support an insane amount of incoming requests, including node. The issue with node is the single threading and having to scale with worker threads AFAIK.

edit: our runtime is C#

[–] mark@programming.dev 3 points 1 year ago* (last edited 1 year ago) (1 children)

The issue with node is the single threading and having to scale with worker threads AFAIK

People always say this but its not technically correct and can be misleading.

Technically, JavaScript runs single threaded but not Node.js itself and certainly not when using it on the backend in something like Express. IO operations and other things tooling libraries do can cause you to run out of a thread pool. But Node.js, when handling requests, gives you much of the benefit of multithreading without having to deal with multithreaded code.

[–] sine@programming.dev 4 points 1 year ago

Aaaahh so libuv actually runs a thread pool, TIL. I'm another victim of internet propaganda I guess 😅 . You know, I never actually checked libuv docs until now and they seem quite welt built.

The silliest thing I've just realized is that I knew that the first implementation of a web server in dotnet core was using libuv, and I still didn't think twice about the single threaded meme.

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