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by kailanb 1650 days ago
does the language that you use matter when the real goal is to serve a webpage to the end user in the shortest time possible?
2 comments

Yes, maintainability, ease of porting code, and ease of hiring knowledgeable workers do matter, and so does performance.

I hope Fastly stops calling things "cold starts" that aren't [1].

And, I think Cloudflare could do a quick find-and-replace on that article [2] to change "Fastly’s Compute@Edge" to "Fastly’s JavaScript on Compute@Edge". A phone call between friendly CEOs probably would have sufficed for that.

We all want to be on the same page when making these comparisons. Some may choose Fastly and write in Rust, some will choose Cloudflare and write in JavaScript.

[1] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=29465729#29468068

[2] https://blog.cloudflare.com/network-performance-update-full-...

Absolutely, runtime overhead plays an outsized role in startup time and latency. garbage collection can also add a ton of latency.