Rust flavored performance on the web; a comparison of Python, JavaScript, and Rust

Is performance testing as lame to talk about as integration or unit testing or the other flavors of testing? As for me, I think performance testing is pretty cool, and when learning something new that is usually one of the first things that I do. Also up there on my list is stress testing and load testing, but that’s for another time.

There is a lot of Rust news lately, from Python modules using rust to the news that some internet protocols are being rewritten in Rust. Rust is known for being safe and fast, so safe that you actively have to try to write unsafe Rust code, and so fast that it is comparable to C. But what does that mean exactly? I don’t write C regularly, in fact, I haven’t touched it with a 10-foot pole since my first semester in college so I have no frame of reference for how fast C is, and most people won't. Most people are more familiar with Python and Node/JavaScript performance so I’d like to do some performance comparisons of the three in an interesting context, at least for Rust.

Rust is known to be a systems programming language, which is synonymous with being more difficult to learn, it also means that it wasn’t made for web servers or APIs, but there have been quite a few libraries written in Rust for this purpose. Because Rust is fairly new and not made…