[cure]

PyPy is faster than Python, yes. But Go, C and many other (compiled) languages are way faster than PyPy. Plus, if you use a language like Go or Rust then you avoid Python's GIL and you'll have much more reasonable memory usage. Best of all, deploying is a matter of copying a binary, rather than having to deal with the absolute disaster that is Python packaging.

[deaddodo]

> Plus, if you use a language like Go or Rust then you avoid Python's GIL

No, but then you run into Go's GC and green threads. File systems fit squarely in the realms of "systems programming" (old definition [1], not new). Languages like Ada, Pascal, C/C++, Rust and D (without GC).

[1] - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/System_programming_language

[klyrs]

Filesystem with a GIL, what could possibly go wrong? /s

[emmelaich]

A lot less will go wrong than a filesystem without a GIL.

GIL is for safety and correctness, not speed.

[y4mi]

Uh, no?

Python's global interpreter lock was added for single threaded speed and c library integrations, which often can't be used multithreaded

There was some talk about removing it recentlish to improve pythons multithreaded performance and Guido said something along the lines of

> "I'll remove it as long as single threaded performance doesn't suffer"

Which nobody succeeded in

[nine_k]

Go? A GC'd language in kernel? (Well, yes, this has been done, from Lua to Haskell, but only experimentally.)

[hu3]

I wouldn't advise writing low level stuff in Go but people do enjoy a challenge from time to time: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=18399389

[pjmlp]

I wouldn't consider the workstations sold by Xerox, TI, Connecting Machines, the OS research department at ETHZ or the Microsoft’s natural language search service for the West Coast and Asia, just experiments.

[weberc2]

Python is also a GC’d language...

[twa927]

CPython is mostly reference-counted.

[int_19h]

With a synchronous garbage collector for cycles. Which is like the worst of both worlds, since you get the constant overhead of refcounting, plus unpredictable interruptions of unspecified duration that can happen every time a new object that might contain references to other objects is created.

To be fair, the GC can be disabled. But it's only safe to do so when you know there are no cycles, and even when such guarantee can be had for your own code, I've never seen a library guarantee that to API clients.

[BlackFingolfin]

And reference counting is a form of GC

[fnord123]

>PyPy is faster than Python, yes.

Python is only slow if you use it wrong:

https://apenwarr.ca/diary/2011-10-pycodeconf-apenwarr.pdf