| > Stackoverflow is doing just fine with Windows Server. Good for them! I guess it mostly depends on what you want to build your platform around, what the constraints are and what developer skillsets are popular in your market. > Java 6 would still blow the water out of Ruby's slow interpreter. Probably! I do recall major GC improvements starting from JDK 8 onwards, though when compared to Ruby even the older versions would probably be decent: https://blogs.oracle.com/javamagazine/post/java-garbage-coll... It would actually be fun if someone pulled out the old versions from back then and did some benchmarks, though maybe asking someone to build a full stack application in such a dated tech would be a tough ask, unless they're passionate about it! > Being pleasant isn't relevant for performance. If the discussion is just about performance, then that's true. If we look at things realistically, then there's more to it - like using a tech stack that allows you to iterate reasonably quickly, as opposed to making your developers want to quit their jobs every time they have to debug some obscure Servlet related bug or to work with brittle configuration in XML (been there dozens of times), to the point where not as much could even get built in a given amount of time with a particular stack due to its challenges. I do hate when people say that additional nodes are way cheaper than developer salaries, but they're also correct most of the time. Of course, there's also the humanitarian take to just not forget about the developer experience, otherwise we'd have written all of our web software in C++ even back then. It'd work really fast, but we'd have way less software in general. |