I’ve been using my old static site generator setup for years now, when I first started using DocPad it was fast, simple and had the ability to add plugins which made it immensely extensible. However since then development has died down and there have been some questions about how long the development will continue, my site has become more complex requiring a number of additional plugins, and the general performance of DocPad seems to have slowed down (mostly due to the additional plugins ect.)

Static sites are great, they allow you to build a website using nothing but client side tech, and let you host them easily in places like AWS S3, Github/Gitlab pages, or even on an arduino as they dont require any server side code. However they do have one big downside, user interaction.

Kotlin is a programming language developed by Jetbrains in 2011 as a JVM alternative to Java, it gained popularity amongst Android developers and in 2017 Google started officially supporting it as a first class language on Android. Until now I had only used it on Android but with the release of Spring 2.0, and the official support of Kotlin, I thought now would be a great time to try it out!

In 2014 Double Fine released a game by the name of Hack ’n’ Slash, the premise being that you could access the code running the game and modify it to change how the game works, it was a really cool premise though maybe not that interestingly implemented. The way it worked was by using a scripting language to run the logic of the game actors and thus allowing you to modify their code.

I have been building a couple of prototypes recently and came accross the need to use native code in one of them, specifically on the backend. After debating which tech I should try out for this, I decided to give it a test and figure out if the performance differences could sway my vote between my usual go-to languages, Scala and GoLang.