You've basically just listed Perl 3 times though. Particularly when the guts of the code in all 3 of those examples was Perl's standard database interface (the same DBI you'd use for CGI Perl or even standalone .pl scripts).

I do love Perl for the flexibility of it's syntax and how concise the code can be. But for me the performance of Go won out. And while mod_perl* does make great gains in performance, it also makes the code a lot less portable (unlike Go). So I found myself porting my performance critical webapps over to Go

* I've not tried Mojolicious, Dancer nor Kelp so I couldn't comment on how they compare for performance.

> Particularly when the guts of the code in all 3 of those examples was Perl's standard database interface (the same DBI you'd use for CGI Perl or even standalone .pl scripts).

The benchmark page clearly tags which implementations use raw SQL access and which use an ORM. These all happen to be using raw SQL. To my knowledge, none of them have a pre-bundled ORM, and I'm not sure whether the ORM tested implementations are only supposed to indicate the pre-shipped ORM.

> But for me the performance of Go won out

I wasn't trying to imply they competed on that metric, I just wanted to give some examples of much simpler implementations. What one considers small is obviously relative.

> I've not tried Mojolicious, Dancer nor Kelp so I couldn't comment on how they compare for performance.

They all look to be bottom-half of the full set of results, performance wise. Mojolicious quite a bit slower (relatively, they are all slow compared to Go) than the others, most likely because it uses it's own internal, pure Perl JSON module. There's was to fall back to the optimized C-based JSON::XS module, but I'm not sure whether that would keep with the spirit of the benchmarks.

You miss my point. All of those examples you gave used the same core database framework and as the test was primarily a database performance test, all those 3 examples were essentially the same core Perl code.

Whether it's ORM or raw SQL is completely besides the point (though since we're on the topic, Perl's DBI basically works the same as Go's - or rather that should be the other way around given their age).

>I wasn't trying to imply they competed on that metric

Again, you missed my point. I wasn't suggestion that you were comparing the performance of the two. I was commenting on why I switched away from Perl to Go.

> I just wanted to give some examples of much simpler implementations.

Except you didn't You gave AN example (singular). It was one language; Perl.

> They all look to be bottom-half of the full set of results, performance wise.

I wouldn't trust that kind of benchmark for comparisons of Perl frameworks as setting up a Perl environment isn't as simple as compiling a Go program. With Perl, you have a number of different ways you can hook the runtimes into the web server (CGI, Apache libs, etc), pure Perl and C libraries (which you also mentioned) that significantly affect both memory usage and runtime performance and a whole boatload of config ($ENVS in mod_perl, bespoke handlers, etc) that also affect performance.

The ironic thing with Perl is despite scripts in the language being some of the most portable code on the POSIX community, running performance critical Perl webapps leads to very unportable set ups. (which was the other reason I migrated my sites to Go).

This might sound critical, but I genuinely do love Perl. I'd say it was up there as one of my favourite languages (and over the years I've learn to develop in a great number of different languages). But sadly nothing in life is perfect.

I think we are talking past each other. I listed a lot of frameworks, including three in python. I started with Perl, and added a whole bunch more. I could, and should, have presented them better.

Personally I think the fact they are using DBI is the inconsequential part. It takes up few lines of the example, and most of the other code is the specifics of the framework (although they are very similar, because they all Sinatra clones, to varying degrees). What do you expect to be different in a non-DB based test (I'm still unclear what point you are trying to make)? Their template systems are pretty simple to use as well.

> Again, you missed my point. I wasn't suggestion that you were comparing the performance of the two. I was commenting on why I switched away from Perl to Go.

That's fine, and a worthy conversation to have, I'm just trying to keep this on the topic of implementation size, since I think the performance side of the discussion is being handled well enough elsewhere.

> Except you didn't You gave AN example (singular). It was one language; Perl.

Actually I gave eight examples, three Perl, three Python, three lua and 1 Ruby. The fact there were three Perl implementations first, and listed by themselves is sort of an accident. I was really interested in how Mojolicious did, since that's my favorite at the moment, and then I checked the other Perl implementations, and then I looked for others that might be good examples. I intended for them to be taken all together, even if that's not how it seemed.

> With Perl, you have a number of different ways you can hook the runtimes into the web server (CGI, Apache libs, etc), pure Perl and C libraries ...

> he ironic thing with Perl is despite scripts in the language being some of the most portable code on the POSIX community, running performance critical Perl webapps leads to very unportable set ups.

How recent is the data this opinion is based on? My understanding is that now most (new) Perl web projects are using PSGI as a common back-end making it extremely portable, and often using pure-perl servers for performance. There's some evidence they can significantly beat mod_perl2[1].

> This might sound critical, but I genuinely do love Perl. I'd say it was up there as one of my favourite languages (and over the years I've learn to develop in a great number of different languages). But sadly nothing in life is perfect.

I was really, _really_ trying to not make it a Perl vs Go thing. It's obvious I do have a preference though. I'm glad you like Perl, it does seem to fit the mindset of certain people well, and even if they don't stick with it, they remember it fondly. :)

[1]: http://old.nabble.com/mod_perl2-vs-Starman-and-other-pure-pe...

I wasn't aware of PSGI nor the performance it has compared to mod_perl. That's probably one of the most interesting things I've read on here for a while (interesting in terms of it could have a direct impact on my business).

Thanks for that. :)

I wasn't offended, just sort of confused. ;)

> Thanks for that. :)

No problem! To tell the truth I didn't really have a clue about real performance until I looked it up for that post. I use the hypnotoad (pure-Perl preforking non-blocking), server for Mojolicious for my projects, but those are mostly internal, so I didn't have to worry much about performance. I always figured I would look more into it when it mattered. I thought worst case I would deploy using PSGI on mod_perl, but I also knew from prior experience you can get pretty good performance from a pure-Perl solution.

You realize that Go implements the new template test right? Your linked ones do not (at least the ones I spot checked).

Also, Go is statically typed = win

Actually I find Perl's type system to make the most sense for web work:

1) Any zero length string or 0 valued int is classed as false, which is handy when checking the returns from query strings et al.

2) You can use eq for string comparison or == for numeric checking, which means which is handy has you can read values from a query string and then compare it against an int without having to do type conversion.

Don't get me wrong, I don't have anything against statically typed languages - in fact I normally prefer them. But the way Perl does type checking I find reduces the number of type problems when dealing with web development.

That all said, I much prefer working with structured types in Go than in Perl.

hello.go uses more lines defining variables and types than the entirely of many of the alternatives I posted. Obviously they will be a little longer if they implement the fortune handler, but I doubt that will really make much of a difference.

> Also, Go is statically typed = win

I'm not sure what that has to do with implementation size (which is the only thing I was addressing), but feel free to make a case.