World's "Fastest" Small Web Server Released, Based On LISP

Cougem writes "John Fremlin has released what he believes to be the worlds fastest webserver for small dynamic content, teepeedee2. It is written entirely in LISP, the world's second oldest high-level programming language. He gave a talk at the Tokyo Linux Users Group last year, with benchmarks, which he says demonstrate that 'functional programming languages can beat C.' Imagine a small alternative to Ruby on rails, supporting the development of any web application, but much faster."

Comments

Re:He's also right

[The_Wilschon]

You forget about compilers. LISP gets compiled (by most implementations), too. All the "nifty high level programming shit" can, and sometimes does, if you have a good enough compiler, get compiled away. Furthermore, the "nifty high level programming shit" provides a whole lot more information to the compiler, allowing it to do much more aggressive optimizations because it can prove that they are safe. If somebody comes up with a slick new optimization technique, I don't have to rewrite my LISP code, I just implement it in the compiler. You'd have to go back through every line of C code you've ever written in order to implement it. If somebody gives you a radically different CPU architecture, the C code that is so wonderfully optimized for one CPU will run dog slow. You can reoptimize it for the new arch, but then it will run slow on the old one. With a good LISP compiler, the same code gets optimizations that are appropriate for each arch.

Check out Stalin, SBCL, and http://www.cs.indiana.edu/~jsobel/c455-c511.updated.txt. You might be surprised at what you find.