Potentially convert to tinyhttp

[groenroos]

tinyhttp seems to be a largely Express-compatible alternative Node.js server framework. Consider whether we should ditch Express for tinyhttp.

Pros

• Twice as fast as Express
• Fully compatible with Express middleware, so theoretically migration shouldn't cause huge problems
• TypeScript

Cons

• Not as battle-tested as Express
• Community is a lot smaller

Open questions

• We need to ensure that all the other Express bits we use in fact work with tinyhttp (session with any arbitrary connect store, file upload, etc)
• As Sapling adds some overhead, need to benchmark both implementations to make sure the performance/speed benefit is still applicable - the cons are probably worth it if it's truly around 2x as fast, but perhaps not worth it as much if the speed improvement is incremental/negligible

[groenroos]

Worth noting that there are other Express replacements, for instance polka (which seems to have even better requests-per-second performance than tinyhttp).

However, on a cursory read, it seems like whereas tinyhttp seems to be a largely 1:1 Express compatible framework and thus minimal difference on the surface, adopting polka would require rewriting big parts of the app (e.g. polka has no response helpers, and middleware is loaded differently).

[talentlessguy]

Hi, tinyhttp author here

recently I released 1.3 with lots of bugfixes and improvements. Community also has grown a bit but stll not as large.

[groenroos]

Nice one! I'll take a look at what it'll take to do this conversion over the next weekend, and see where we are! 👍