I don't think "Lisps are just generally slower and use more resources" is true.
According to "TechEmpower Web Framework Benchmarks" (which might not be perfect but at least give some indication), Clojure is one of the fastest language (in terms of handling responses per second) for building a JSON API with. Take a look at https://metosin.github.io/reitit/performance.html
I don’t think those results are actually particularly meaningful or that they scale up very well, but I’m going to skip that and address other relevant matters.
I mentioned resource usage, and that includes memory usage. The JVM can be surprisingly fast for some types of code, but it’s never a memory lightweight.
I suppose I might as well mention another feature I value: ease of deployment. In Rust, I can produce a single statically-linked binary which I can drop on a server, or on users’ machines, or whatever as appropriate, and run it. For anything on the JVM… yeah, without extremely good cause I will consider dependency on the JVM to be a blocker, especially for a consumer product.
True, but also Clojure is not the only Lisp, just one I remembered was mentioned in a actual benchmark as being fast at some things.
Nowadays you can either chose a Lisp that does compile to a single binary and doesn't require the JVM (like SBCL or something like that), or you could use Clojure but use GraalVM to get the single binary.
Anyways, I agree with your general point, Rust being in general faster. But I don't agree with the whole "Lisps are just generally slower and use more resources" thing, while it's certainly true in some conditions.
It’s rather hard to meaningfully measure any of these figures.
Startup you can measure, but the optimal tuning for faster general operation may start up slower, so now you might want both figures. And then you’re getting perilously close to development considerations, so once you’re doing that surely you should benchmark any required compilation, and so on.
Warmup is even harder to handle well, because it introduces another dimension; even if you were presenting just a single-dimensional figure (which you’re not quite), you’re now wanting to consider how that varies over time while warming up, so now it’s at least two-dimensional. But unless warmup takes ages, you’ll find it hard to get statistically significant figures, because you have so many fewer samples in each time slice.
Total installed size? Problematic because the number isn’t meaningfully comparable, as this is a minimal test, and a number in that scope gives no indication of how much is due to the environment (e.g. JRE, CPython, &c.), and how much further growth there will be as you add more features. People will also start arguing about what should count; if for example you count the delta from a given base OS installation, then you’re providing an advantage to something that uses the system version of, say, Python, and penalising something that requires a different and extra version of Python.
Memory usage? Suppose you pick two figures: peak memory usage, and idle memory usage after the tests. Both are easy to measure, but neither is particularly useful. Idle memory usage, similar problem to disk usage, and so the numbers aren’t usefully comparable. Peak memory usage is perhaps surprisingly the more useless of the two, because the increase in memory usage is strongly correlated with how many requests are being served at once—and so a slower contestant might artificially use less memory than a faster one; and so if you wanted those numbers to be comparable, you’d need to throttle requests to the lowest common denominator, which could then be argued as penalising light memory usage patterns.
The fastest for these sort of things are usually C++, Rust, C projects[1]. The fastest Java projects are Rapidoid, wizzardo-http, and proteus. The link you provided does not have a comprehensive comparison of different HTTP JSON frameworks.
According to "TechEmpower Web Framework Benchmarks" (which might not be perfect but at least give some indication), Clojure is one of the fastest language (in terms of handling responses per second) for building a JSON API with. Take a look at https://metosin.github.io/reitit/performance.html