I benchmarked Bytes-over-Ports workarounds

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I have struggled multiple times with the inability to send elm/bytes over ports in Elm.
Searching for solutions I have seen multiple ways to do it, each suboptimal in their own way.
Recently I wondered which method is the most performant and created GitHub - anmolitor/elm-bytes-ports-benchmark: Compares a the different available hacks to get bytes from JS into Elm and vice versa.

Before you click the link:

  • What methods do you know currently?
  • Which one do you expect to perform the best for small amounts of Bytes?
  • Which one do you expect to perform the best for large amounts of Bytes?

I was surprised how well a HTTP approach via patching the XMLHttpRequest prototype
performed. I expected it to do well, but only for large sizes. Apparently the overhead of creating a request/response object is lower than I thought.

What do you think about the method used for benchmarking? Are there any potential ways that I missed?

Thanks for reading and lets hope that in the Future there is a standard way for passing Bytes between the languages without overhead.

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Patching XMLHttpRequest to get bytes over ports is such a hack though… and how do we recieve bytes through a port? Love Elm, but hate that this has been broken for soooo loooong…

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The JS → Elm side for Http uses a normal port with null/unit type to tell Elm: hey please make a Http Request and then patches the request to return bytes from JS. So just like Elm → JS bit with an extra step. Still apparently faster than using File.decoder in all benchmarked cases.

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Good work on setting up these benchmarks.

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For my comprehension, if all you care about is sending bytes in an http message (think web-grpc style protobuf encoded data) then does one need to care about this? I.e. is the focus here in getting bytes over ports specifically?

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Yeah exactly. If you can work without ports, just do that, it will have the best possible performance, and needs no XMLHttpRequest monkeypatch.

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