SyntaxTax: a token-cost benchmark across web stacks. Meteor isn’t in it.
Should we add it?
Someone on r/rails shared a small benchmark called SyntaxTax. The idea: implement the same API features in different stacks, then count how many tokens the handwritten code takes. Not performance, not “which framework is best” — just how compact or noisy each stack is as context for LLM-assisted development.
Ten stacks so far: FastAPI, Sinatra, Express, Gin, Slim (API-first group) and Rails, Django, NestJS, Spring Boot, Laravel (opinionated group). Every implementation has to pass the same functional validation before it’s measured. The main metric is handwritten_tokens, with total_tokens and an operational_ratio (structural overhead outside the app logic) as complementary reads. Rails came out with the lowest handwritten token count. Dashboard here:
Meteor isn’t in the list, and I think it should be. Two options:
- Contribute a Meteor stack to SyntaxTax. The spec and validation script are in the repo, the methodology is already defined, and the author explicitly built it to be extended. A Meteor implementation (methods + collections, or Meteor + accounts-express for the HTTP part) would give us a like-for-like number against Rails, Django, NestJS and the rest.
- Run a Meteor-specific version. SyntaxTax only measures a REST API. Meteor’s advantage isn’t there — it’s in what you don’t have to write: no API layer between client and server, real-time data without extra plumbing, accounts built in. A fair benchmark for us would spec a small full-stack feature (say, a list with live updates and auth) and compare Meteor against Next.js + Express + Prisma + a websocket lib, or similar.
For who want to work on it: Feel free to choose what do 