On Wed, Jun 15, 2011 at 3:01 PM, Paul Querna <p...@querna.org> wrote: > I think we have all joked on and off about 3.0 for... well about 8 years now.
At least! > I think there are exciting things happening in C however. I love C, but unless we can come up with something radical, it's hard to see a way out of the prison it creates. That realisation led me to hacking mostly on functional-oriented servers. I'll try to explain why - in case any of those thoughts are useful here too :) I like the things you've pointed out, but they seem relatively cosmetic. Things like the parser, async, event and portability frameworks are really cool - but hardly fundamental. Anyone could use those, in any language - it's not a real leap in the field. Similarly, SPDY, websockets, COMET and so on are ultra-cool - but are still potential bolt-ons to almost any kind of webserver. It sucks that we don't do them well, but doing them better won't fundamentally change the market or the pressures on adoption. Today webservers are almost entirely network I/O bound - disk seek and CPU speeds are pretty great these days, way faster than is really neccessary. In a properly architected set-up, end-user delay is really about the limitations of TCP. You can multiplex and use keepalives as much as you want, you'll eventually realise that the size of the world and speed of light mean that this inevitably ends up being slow without a lot of distributed endpoints. But we have some cool secret sauce to help fix that. I think the best architectural thing about Apache is buckets and brigades. Using a list structure to represent portions of differently-generated content like that is great. Imagine how much better wordpress would run if PHP represented the php scripts as a some dynamic buckets intermingled with some static file io buckets (and even repeated when in loops). There'd be a lot less data to copy around. Now imagine a backend that could identify the dynamic buckets and, by forbidding side effects, parallellise work on them - a bucket as a message in message-passing system of co-routines, for example. Imagine that in turn feeding into a set of co-routine filters. That's fundamentally different - it parallelises content generation, but it's really really hard to do in C. Then next, imagine a backend that could identify the static buckets and re-order them so that they come first - it could understand things like XML and Javascript and intelligently front-load your transfer so that the content we have ready goes first, while the dynamic stuff is being built. It's a real layer-8-aware scheduler and content re-compiler. Again it's really really hard to do in C - but imagine the benefits of a server layer that really understood how to model and re-order content. These are the kinds of transform that make a webservers job as optimal as it can be. Network data is the most expensive part of any modern web application, in terms of both time and money, so the ecosystem faces huge economic pressure to make these as optimal as possible over time. Things like SPDY are just the first generation. It'd be cool if Apache 3.0 could do those things - we have some great building blocks and experience - but it feels like a language with support for first-order functions and co-routines would be better at it. Again, I'm just thinking out loud :) -- Colm
