[blueben]

Do you have evidence that reddit (or any site using a dynamic language) would reduce overall operating costs by switching, or is this an assumption on your part? What about development costs? What about time to deploy new features? What about the cost to make platform revisions? Do you have evidence that a non-dynamic language would really be so much faster that it would require less hardware? Perhaps the problem is not the language, but the chosen architecture?

What I'm really trying to say here is... prove it.

[apower]

I don't have evidence Reddit would reduce operating costs since they haven't switched yet, and I don't have access to their code/architecture/etc to decide one way or the other. However, based on my personal experience, static type languages are much faster than dynamic languages and use much less resources. They used substantial less servers to maintain the same SLA throughput. You don't have to take this advice and keep paying for the high cost of hardware. There's a belief that developer cost is much higher than hardware cost and thus it's justified. However, when scaling out, hardware cost is much higher than developer cost. Developer cost is a fixed sunken cost at initial development. Afterward it's just maintenance and can be scaled down, but the hardware operation cost is ongoing, increasing years after years.

[jedberg]

> and I don't have access to their code/architecture/etc

Actually, you do! :) http://code.reddit.com

But to help you out, I'll tell you that a good chunk of the expensive loops are written in C.

[apower]

Proof that static type languages are much faster than dynamic languages. Reddit has resorted to use C for speedup.

[blueben]

Proof that in this single instance, Reddit developers decided this was a suitable optimization for their codebase.

This also calls into question the original assumption, that posters believed Reddit had far too many wasteful servers to handle their service, and that it was because they use a dynamic language.

[jedberg]

Was there ever a question about that? I thought that was pretty much a fact. Of course static typed languages are faster.

[SkyMarshal]

Difficult to prove, but an observation with precedent. 37 Signals is famous for justifying Ruby by saying that hardware is cheap, developer time is not, so use RoR and just throw servers at your app till it meets your performance needs. Hardware is cheap, but maybe not cheap enough to run a site like Reddit with intentionally scant ad revenue.

[axod]

Hardware is cheap. Amazon hosting is not.

[apower]

Do you have evidence that dynamic language have less overall development cost?