Hacker News new | ask | show | jobs
by oblio 2071 days ago
> ... turns out no that cost can be completely eliminated.

Is it eliminated in any production interpreter/VM used by Python, Ruby or any other mainstream language?

I mean, it's nice if it's research, but if I'm a boring programmer churning out Enterprise Middleware using these languages, do I get to use it?

Or is it just a pre-alpha branch of PyPy that might be out in 2025, if we're lucky? :-)
1 comments
chrisseaton 2071 days ago
Yeah it's not all production-ready yet.

But come on... we were arguing 'impossible' a second ago and now we're watered that down to 'not production ready'. We're making progress.

link
hitekker 2071 days ago
My team spent a quarter trying to write a high-performance python web service. We investigated academic papers, evaluated open source solutions and then conducted bare metal tests to verify our findings.

Turns out the lookup is a dictionary in raw Python is two order magnitudes slower than an equivalent hashmap lookup in Java.

Once the numbers came in, we realized we had to choose the right language for the job.

Python is great but it's not the end-all, be-all.

link
chrisseaton 2071 days ago
> Python is great but it's not the end-all, be-all.

Yes I agree often it's better to rewrite in a different language if you can.

But if people tell me they want to program in Python or Ruby and they tell me it's worth it for them... then let's make it as fast as we can for them.

link