[ilovecaching]

Choosing a language is a difficult task, I agree. It is often qualitative improvements that are used to argue for new languages, which most engineers are skeptical of, as they tend to favor quantitative needle moving. So it's difficult to determine if something is 2x.

I choose languages through a series of criteria. First, based on my principles, which limits me to languages were safety, efficiency, and expressiveness are highly valued. I find that most languages have some core principles listed on their website. Then I take my software's requirements, and find a language in my subset of choices that is a best fit. If I am on a team, then we have to come to a consensus on the teams shared principles, which I find is very useful outside of choosing a language.

I think that services can be sized sufficiently large to be replaceable and still encapsulate most critical code paths such that sharing memory should be a rare requirement. Facebook and google are both examples of companies operating at hyper scale based on RPC service architecture. For those times were it is a requirement, I can't argue that RPC is a good choice. C is a great lingua franca, and most languages support its ABI (at least the ones used for critical performance).

[htfy96]

Then we are basically on the same side. It's just our principles that vary. Security is ensured with external tools (e.g., SQL sanitizer/checker/minimum privilege), and AWS's 4TB instance exists for a reason - graph data is hard to scale. Sometimes even passing over sharing memory is too slow for us and we rolled out copy-free allocators which directly allocate objects on that memory region.