Benchmark Driven Development and Parsing binary data in JavaScript

I’ve come across an interesting read on the development of a mysql client for Node.js. The full article can be found here:

https://github.com/felixge/faster-than-c

It’s a very interesting read on the competition among similar open-source projects nowadays, but what really made me think was the concept of Benchmark Driven Development. It is awesome, and i’ve seen projects like WebScaleSql use it but not naming it that.

Other thing that was impressive was the fact that in a given point in time, the mentioned mysql libraries had so much throughput that they could take down the actual mysql server. In fact, that could look that way with a single DB server, but with a cluster with many read-only slaves I think we could still use it (the article does not specify the type of commands that are being executed, so i’m assuming that they are talking about reads. scaling writes is much harder).

Anyway, I recommend that you read that article. It’s a 5 minute read, and it’s worth it.