[ken47]

This propagates a myth that the choice of language is the bottleneck in a complex program. Twitch hires engineers who are good enough not to be constrained by the difficulties of learning a particular language.

Odds are, Twitch wasn't trying to optimize over a long time horizon when they chose Go. They were once a scrappy startup, surely accumulating technical debt left and right to get product features out. Go was likely a locally optimal choice.

Twitch chat also requires heavy string processing, and that's an arena where, if I had to guess, Go has an edge over Erlang.

[chipperyman573]

It's not really heavy string processing, it's all just replacing inner strings (not even Regex).

[ken47]

Sure. I think we're talking about different things when we say heavy. Perhaps less ambiguous phrasing would have been "frequent string manipulation."