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

Perl is faster than C, too.

[Anonymous Coward]

And Java is faster too!

(rolls eyes)

Different tools are good for various solving various problems.

Yeah, I know certain library routines in certain languages are better than others.

Interpreted languages, in general, are not faster than compiled languages. Period.

This "faster than C" canard keeps getting trotted out and shot down every time.

Well, there is one language faster: assembly.

Re:"functional programming languages can beat C"

[epiphani]

No, definitely not in speed.

He wrote a LISP-based memory-only webserver that could respond to requests roughly 10% faster than lighttpd with php. I promise you, if I wrote a C implementation that performed only the functionality he implemented, it would blow it out of the water. In fact, before anyone else comes out with the "X is faster than C!" claim, I'll leave the challenge out there:

I will prove that anything written in a higher-level language will not be as fast as my implementation of it in C. I leave this challenge out to anyone to take. (*)

Seriously, I'm sick of this crap. Bring it on.

(*) Caveat: It must be a small challenge involving a relatively simple task. I don't have a lot of time to waste on this.