[jonstewart]

I don't understand "how we made X in Ruby/Python Y% faster" posts. It is of course possible to optimize functions in any language, and often worthwhile to do, but if you're going to spend a lot of engineering resources on it, then can I introduce you to my friends C++ and Rust?

[zahlman]

Part of the point of using "friendlier" languages is to make it easier (or perhaps feasible) to express better algorithms. Porting existing code to a very different language is not fun, either. No matter how many "engineering resources" you're planning to spend, there are more and less efficient ways of doing so. Very often, "use C or Rust" (or other such languages) is simply not one of the more efficient ways. If it consistently were, other languages wouldn't be nearly as popular as they are.

[liontwist]

Expressing a better algorithm, or getting optimizations for free is clear win.

What’s not clear is why these languages should expose more low level performance tuning - such as multithreaded python. This removes invariants which make the language friendly, so that experts can squeeze out a constant speed up factor which is already an order of magnitude off from the proper tool.

[knowitnone]

I agree