People who don’t understand what they’re talking about, yes.

TBH reading into the shenanigans around Actix and some of the other “top speed” competitors has negatively affected my opinion of Techempower in particular because it’s gotten so artificial; like 1000HP supercars that are fun to drive on a track but get 25 miles to a tank of gas.

I use benchmarking solely to decide between multiple potential implementations if their other characteristics are identical so it comes down to what is most performant.

I see little value in comparisons between languages. In general runtime- and/or memory-efficiency is not usually the most important factor in the apps I am building on a day to day basis, so I prefer to make decisions based on developer efficiency/short- and long-term maintainability instead.

Like I mentioned in my post, I understand that most technical people know that benchmarks(techempower especially) do not represent the real life. But besides developers, there’s also a ton of other people in the industry that are more easily influenced by medium articles, benchmarks and other stuff that in turn can influence tech used by given company.
I feel like techempower shows Elixir in a bad light. I know that we want to present f.e. Phoenix in a fairly real-life approach, but the truth is, no other framework there does it.

I’ve seen .NET implementations for techempower. I would not ever, EVER, in my life write API like that, using Spans and hardcoded, static headers. But people still use the argument that .NET(Core+) is ‘fast’ and ‘high in benchmarks’, half of reddit is wet just thinking about ‘how fast .NET Core is’ now, while none of them probably have ever implemented something that has to have a sub 100ms response time, or was ever bottlenecked by setting date in a header…

What I meant with that post especially, is that I’d love to see more knowledgeable people in Elixir community, try to optimize the hell out of that benchmark, to show to the ‘outside world’ that we can do it as well. I’m too far of a scrub in this matter yet, to help with really anything(though if I can, I’d love to).
Would be awesome to have a benchmark of real-life framework implementations that @AstonJ mentions here as well.

In my mind, these benchmarks are more of a marketing statement for frameworks/languages, rather than anything else. People all over the internet keep quoting techempower when they consider speed of certain stacks. Do they know that that implementation in no way represents their CRUD WebApp that will be bottlenecked by IO anyway? Of course. Do they care? I honestly don’t think so. I keep bringing techempower as an example, because as a backend developer, this is really the only ‘benchmark’ that I know of(besides https://benchmarksgame-team.pages.debian.net/ which is even more questionable), which I think speaks of its popularity somehow. Also just googling stuff like ‘web framework benchmark’ has them on the top.

I think that there’s a lot of things that people care about when deciding on a stack and I’m sure that topping benchmarks won’t suddenly make Elixir the coolest kid on the block, but I think it would be a step in the right direction.