[cap-talk] Dan Bernstein's qmail security lessons paper

[James A. Donald]

James Donald writes:
 > > Java has dreadful performance problems:

David Wagner wrote:
 > Well, "dreadful" is rhetoric that appeals to emotion
 > rather than reason. I think it's a good idea to
 > quantify these claims.  How much slower is a
 > Java-based web server, using metrics that are an
 > appropriate measure of end-to-end web server
 > performance?

My observation that Java has dreadful performance is
based entirely on client side programs.

 > It's my impression that Java is arguably the dominant
 > platform for web services, in the enterprise world.
 > How do you reconcile that with your view of Java?

The choice in practice is between PHP, Perl, Java and
C++.  If you write in C++, you will get memory leaks,
and your server will grind to a halt.  Java's
performance is not too bad when compared to PHP.  Perl
is write only, which means that the if the engineer
wanders off, the businessman is hosed.  Businessmen
therefore never specify Perl, but frequently discover
that they are running Perl scripts, long after the fact.

Lisp has no memory leaks, and substantially better
performance than Java, but Lisp programmers are not
interchangeable and readily replaceable.  Businessmen
are worried that if they create their website in Lisp,
they yield too much control to the engineer.