[kibwen]

I'd say it's true that Python is fast enough for most web servers. Rather than strictly considering performance, I'd guess that people seeking to do webdev in Rust are looking to leverage Rust's static analysis to improve resilience, trading off up-front productivity for long-term maintainability (which isn't to denigrate Python, which I love, but fearless refactoring really is something that compiled langs excel at). It's not the right tradeoff for everyone or every application, certainly. And maybe other people just really like Rust. :P

[kevan]

We also shouldn't discount it just because Python is usually fast enough (all my personal projects are in Python). Developer time is cheaper than hardware 99% of the time. For the 1% that are running millions of requests per second through their web stacks the value proposition is pretty compelling.

[mmargerum]

Not when you are renting the hardware. Lean languages like Swift, Rust and even Go look pretty attractive when you are paying by the hour.

[xfer]

> Developer time is cheaper than hardware 99% of the time.

I find the exact opposite to be true in most cases.

[mixedCase]

In bare metal deployments or cloud? If the latter, then moving to the former seems like an obvious choice.

[kevan]

Whoops, I stated that backwards. My time is more valuable than the CPU's most of the time.

[OJFord]

> fearless refactoring really is something that compiled langs excel at

Would you say that's a feature of compilation? I'd have said it's Rust's strong and static type system that makes refactoring 'fearless' and generally aids productivity and maintainability.

Python ≥3.6 with liberal type hinting is a more interesting comparison in my view.