from Hacker News

A real-world comparison between Cloudflare and Fastly

by andrewbarba on 12/17/21, 7:04 PM with 5 comments

• by kentonv on 12/18/21, 2:58 PM

  Nice post. I like the focus on developer experience rather than just performance.

  Workers' implementation of pipeTo() is indeed optimized to avoid entering the JavaScript isolate at all during the operation. I agree this probably explains the performance difference here.

  For setting `Content-Length` on a streaming response, Cloudflare has a non-standard extension called `FixedLengthStream`. It works the same as an identity `TransformStream` except you pass the expected stream length to the constructor.

  Example: https://cloudflareworkers.com/#c2a014c7f67df83f9ad3ea90e9c60...

  We would of course prefer to implement a standard API here, but at present there doesn't seem to be one.

  (I'm the tech lead for Cloudflare Workers.)

• by fyrn- on 12/18/21, 4:14 AM

  I didn't dig into the benchmark, but this seems to use typescript which fastly I think claimed in the inital post was "beta"? I would be interested to see how this compares to fastly with rust/wasm as their more mature system, even if that would also inherantly not be apples to apples (not that you can ever have that with something like this anyway)

• by aliswe on 12/17/21, 9:18 PM

  Anyone care to summarize?