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by dom0 3535 days ago
Honestly you sound confused.

Performance is not a magical inherent property of a language-and-webserver combination, and will vary wildly with the application. In my experience practical performance has much more to do with architecture, algorithms and "the other bunch that makes things efficient" -- not so much with a language.

It's also only one facet. And usually not a very important one, either.

1 comments

> Performance is not a magical inherent property of a language

well it is. however most performance characteristics of a language are well understood. mostly python/ruby is slower than a lot of other languages.

> practical performance has much more to do with architecture

well sort of not every case does well with these kinds of languages.

however in most cases it's just fine to use them.

my company changed one product from python to scala. everything was slower in python, however in 90% of our use case that didn't even matter. however we were thread and calculation (i.e. shuffling/changing large lists/maps in memory) where python was just slow. I guess we could've written a library for these kind of transformations in C. however another problem was also PDF generation, which was really really slow in python (for bigger pdf's, slower one's we just fine). we are happy to use scala, but I didn't found python bad or weak. you are pretty fast and the tooling is just amazing. also the ORM's in python are superior to everything i've seen on the JVM world. (Django ORM and SQLAlchemy) I guess they are even the best ORM's out there. if I would be developing more towards a cloud architecture I would probably use python again. you could just do more if you have room for a "infinite" amount of servers

still python is a really great and well designed language. I would everybody encourage to look into it.