I have a small homelab running a few services, some written by myself for small tasks - so the load is basically just me a few times a day.
Now, I’m a Java developer during the day, so I’m relatively productive with it and used some of these apps as learning opportunities (balls to my own wall overengineering to try out a new framework or something).
Problem is, each app uses something like 200mb of memory while doing next to nothing. That seems excessive. Native images dropped that to ~70mb, but that needs a bunch of resources to build.
So my question is, what is you go-to for such cases?
My current candidates are Python/FastAPI, Rust and Elixir, but I’m open for anything at this point - even if it’s just for learning new languages.
Have you tried tuning your jvm settings? 200mb is a lot for a simple app. You can get that pretty dang low just by proper tuning of jvm settings.
If you want something with a small footprint I would personally go for Rust, but anything that compiles to a static binary is going to be better than something that needs a dedicated runtime.
Python is what I use for small one-time scripts and utility stuff that doesn’t need to run long, but it may be worse than Java…
Languages
C.
Frameworks
C.
That said, Python and Rust are great for setting up “starting up” / “small task” apps and growing up from there.
There’s nothing to really grow. It’s mostly just small helpers. Aggregate sensor data, pull data from A and push it to B every hour, a small dashboard, etc.
C is too involved for my case , I want to be productive after all.
Rust is already rather low level, though there are some cool looking frameworks.
C is an extremely expressive language. There’s a reason it won’t die and, while we all love to shit on it for the memes, you can write perfectly safe software in it.
Of course, but I’m not productive in it.
If I have to do everything myself, it will take more time to get it done. The trade-off is of course always control/speed vs convenience, but C is definitely too inconvenient for me.
you can write perfectly safe software in it.
In the same way that you can safely walk through a minefield.
I dunno what you mean about it being an expressive language either. I would say it is relatively low on the expressiveness scale compared to something like Python or OCaml. It’s basically as expensive as Go which is renowned for being unexpressive. Maybe you didn’t mean “expressive”.
If you’ve so far been able to do this stuff in Java, then presumably all your hardware has an OS and such and you don’t need this, but a colleague has been having a lot of fun with Rust and proper embedded development.
It’s very different from regular development, as you’ve got no OS, no filesystem, no memory allocations, no logging. It can most definitely be a pain.
But the guy always has the biggest grin on his face when he tells that he made a custom implementation of the CAN protocol (TCP is too complex for embedded 🙃) and that he had to integrate an LED to output error information and stuff like that. At the very least, it seems to be a lot less abstract, as you’re working directly with the hardware.
Go, you get small static binary, easy to code, and good performance.
Go is quite nice for this, generally low traffic services are less than 100mb used memory if you’re using the standard lib stuff and it’s not a huge jump from the JVM to Go.
