GoKawiilIndependent Kotlin port of 37signals' Campfire matches Rust in benchmark test
A developer spent roughly a day porting 37signals' Rust-based Campfire chat app to Kotlin using Claude Code, aiming to see how the JVM would compare in DHH's running benchmark table of language rewrites. On x86 hardware, the Kotlin port matched Rust's requests-per-second and sometimes exceeded it, despite Kotlin not appearing in the original comparison table.
GoKawiil's interpretation of the reporting above, not reported fact.
The result suggests the widely shared benchmark table may say more about how much optimization effort each port received than about inherent language speed, since DHH's team had already funneled extensive profiling and architectural fixes into the Rust and C versions. This implies garbage-collected languages like Kotlin could be competitive with systems languages when given similar attention, challenging assumptions drawn from the original comparison.
- A Kotlin port of Campfire built in about a day kept pace with or beat Rust on x86 machines.
- DHH's benchmark table has shown huge swings (e.g., Rails jumping 18x in a day) from architectural changes, not language changes alone.
- The experiment implies performance comparisons across these ports reflect effort invested per implementation as much as raw language capability.
Source: wecodefire.com, 2026-10-09
Published there as: “Kotlin keeps up with Rust in DHH's Campfire rewrite”
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