[TekMol]

Performance is the only thing that is holding me back to consider Python for bigger web applications.

Of the 3 main languages for web dev these days - Python, PHP and Javascript - I like Python the most. But it is scary how slow the default runtime, CPython, is. Compared to PHP and Javascript, it crawls like a snake.

Pypy could be a solution as it seems to be about 6x faster on average.

Is anybody here using Pypy for Django?

Did Clubhouse document somewhere if they are using CPython or Pypy?

[zinodaur]

I feel like people let go of perf too easily.

When using something like Golang, I have apps doing normal CRUD-ish queries at 10k QPS, on 32c/64g machines. For most web apps, 10k QPS is much more than they will ever see, and the fact that it is all done in a single process means you could do really cool things with in-memory datastructures.

Instead, every single web app is written as a distributed system, when almost none of them need to be, if they were written on a platform that didn't eat all of their resources.

[midrus]

I could rephrase you comment as why would anyone use Go when I could just use assembler or C and keep all into a single node.

People don't use python because they want performance. People use python because of productivity, frameworks, libraries, documentation, resources and ecosystems. Most projects don't even need 10k qps, but instead most projects do need an ORM, a migrations system, authentication, sessions, etc. Python has bottle tested tools and frameworks for this.

[jusssi]

People have been taught to be irrationally afraid of in-process concurrency (including async). Not too long ago the standard approach for concurrency was "it's hard, don't do it".

I've been told off in code review for using Python's concurrent.futures.ThreadPoolExecutor to run some http requests (making the code finish N times faster, in a context where latency mattered) "because it's hard to reason about".

[mixmastamyk]

Backend controller performance is rarely a bottleneck, and if raw-compute still is there are a number of ways to speed it up, such as cython and/or work queues.

[domino]

Clubhouse is using CPython

[TekMol]

Interesting. Is there a reason for this?

[mst]

It's the standard and best supported approach and the level of speedup you get from PyPy is significantly workload dependent.

[truffdog]

I mean... it's the default?

[fnord77]

The top 5 web app programming languages by market share are PHP, Java, JS, Lua and Ruby.

[fnord77]

lol at the downvotes. sorry your favorite language isn't on the list.

I specifically said "market share", not "best" or "favorite".

https://www.wappalyzer.com/technologies/programming-language...

[TekMol]

...said a stranger on the internet without any sources to back up this claim.

[sdze]

only one data point though, but... https://redmonk.com/rstephens/2021/08/05/top-20-june-2021/

[TekMol]

That one lists the top 5 as:

    Javascript
    Python
    Java
    PHP
    C#

But is it about web?

[fnord77]

source: https://www.wappalyzer.com/technologies/programming-language...

[IshKebab]

Typescript is a nicer language than Python in many ways and it doesn't suffer from Python's crippling performance issues or dubious static typing situation. Plus you can run it in a browser so there's only one language to learn.

[franga2000]

Typescript would be nice if it weren't essentially just a bunch of macros for JavaScript. As it is now, as soon as you want to run it, you lose all the benefits of it (including many performance optimizations that could be made in a statically typed runtime) and of course, all the usual footguns of vanilla JS still apply. It's a great development tool though, I'll give you that.

[IshKebab]

> just a bunch of macros for JavaScript

It isn't any macros. Not sure what you're talking about.

> all the usual footguns of vanilla JS still apply

Yeah that does suck but fortunately ESLint and Typescript have options to prevent most of them. If you use Deno they're enabled by default.

> including many performance optimizations that could be made in a statically typed runtime

Also true, but we're comparing it to PHP and Python.

[TekMol]

You cannot run TS in a browser.

You can compile it to JS or to Webassembly. But you can do that with every language.

[IshKebab]

You can't compile TS to WASM, and there's a big difference between just stripping types from TS and transpiling Java or even something like Dart.

Way to miss the point.