[ Thanks to An Anonymous Reader for
this link. ]
“Recently there has been some chatter on various
programming blogs about how we should be using classic Unix
features to build more scalable infrastructure. This all started
when Ryan Tomayko wrote I like Unicorn because it’s Unix. The gist
of that post was that Eric Wong’s Unicorn, an HTTP server written
in Ruby, performed extremely well despite being written in Ruby
because Eric wasn’t afraid to drop down to the lower-level Unix
system calls instead of using the language’s traditional higher
level abstractions.“Ryan does an excellent job of explaining exactly how following
age-old Unix design patterns and using those system calls is the
right way to go. He provided the code for a simple TCP “echo
server” that can handle clients very efficiently. Not to be
outdone, other popular scripting languages saw their advocates step
forward with examples of doing the same thing. In Python is Unix,
Jacob Kaplan-Moss provides a Python implementation of the same echo
server. In Perl is Unix, Aristotle Pagaltzis presented a Perl
implementation of a pre-forking echo server as well.”