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by glouwbug 19 days ago
“My formative memory of Python was when the Quake Live team used it for the back end work, and we wound up having serious performance problems with a few million users. My bias is that a lot (not all!) of complex “scalable” systems can be done with a simple, single C++ server.”

https://x.com/ID_AA_Carmack/status/1210997702152069120

1 comments

Games like quake are transient and have a small number of users sharing data and if it fails it doesn’t matter enough to need failover, although that could be done relatively easily with a write-ahead log. You need session stickyness at the load balancing layer but otherwise latency is more important than scale, so you don’t need a distributed system per se. Writing a small C/C++ server would make a lot of sense if you didn’t have Go, Rust, etc.