Hacker News new | ask | show | jobs
by knighthack 747 days ago
Why wasn't Python used? I imagine for such a use case it wouldn't be that much heavier to use Python vs Lua.
2 comments
catlifeonmars 747 days ago
Integration complexity could be a factor. I’m making an assumption about the architecture, but embedding Lua in a program is dead simple and you can do so without introducing external dependencies. Python IIRC requires you to ship and package the standard library or have it already installed, the Lua interpreter can be statically embedded in a program.
link
qwertox 747 days ago
Speed, probably. Lua is much faster.
link
nattaylor 745 days ago
Yes, speed. 1,000,000+ QPS and 1,000s of ads to evaluate is common. At that scale it's very distributed, so replication is another challenge.

In a way, its a search problem where bid≈relevance and targeting_match≈recall, so I've seen Solr used here too.

link