Performance competitiveness of a statically compiled language for server-side Web applications

Abstract

Web developers generally prefer coding in dynamically compiled or scripting languages, such as Java and JavaScript, because those languages allow them to deploy applications quickly to deliver new features and bug fixes in a timely manner. In this paper, we compared the Go language, a popular statically compiled language, with two dynamically compiled languages, JavaScript and Java. We evaluated the Acme Air benchmark for three implementations - one in each language. Our experimental results have shown that the Go implementation achieved a 3.8x and 2.4x higher throughput than the JavaScript and Java implementations respectively, after a simple tuning in the server configuration. Our detailed analysis indicated that this is primarily because Go suffers less from polymorphism due to static typing than JavaScript, and because the Web framework for Go causes less overhead to process RESTful Web service requests than that for Java. We argue that statically compiled languages will play more significant roles for Web applications because of their performance advantages and also because of emerging continuous integration and deployment methodologies which eliminate some of the shortcomings in statically compiled languages over dynamically compiled and scripting languages.