| > I have a feeling this is the kind of guy who tells everyone to rewrite a million lines of production code in Go because its "more scalable. As louis ck would say, but maybe??? https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=0O5h4enjrHw I have to somewhat disagree with this. Sure, I give the point that you can just throw more hardware at the problem of scaling. However, there are some problems that do not linear scale and rewriting gives much more of a boost. For example. Just last year I was at a company where they had a backend product system in just under a million lines of code. I'm not going to say what language it was because I know someone will say oh it didnt scale because it's X. In addition, it was starting to get cumbersome by having multiple developers write in it. So the agreement was to rewrite it in GO. What was the net effect? - Less servers, much less. - Faster processing times, significantly more so. - Less code cruft. - Faster feature push. - 1 developer let go of, saved $90k I think all in all, they saved $150k-200 a year by switching to GO. I know it's trendy to say, don't rewrite something in production. But seriously, if the developers agree and the business WILL BE better off with it. Why not? |
The usual reason is that people tend to want to fix/add a bunch of other things beyond just rewriting in language X.
Sure, if it's a straight port for speed (I'm currently doing something similar from TypeScript/Node.js to C++), and you're not adding a bunch of new stuff in the process, that's relatively safe.
But generally, rewrites are expensive and businesses don't like spending a lot of money for something without any new "features" (beyond cost, ironically). If you find yourself with that kind of group, IMO, incremental improvements are a better choice for that business most of the time.