> Is performance that much of a big deal for most people?
For most people outside VC-funded startups, yes it is. It is also an environmental concern, imagine if 80% of the web was running on ruby.
For most people outside VC-funded startups, yes it is. It is also an environmental concern, imagine if 80% of the web was running on ruby.
Most people don't understand that 99% of performance issues are not caused by language performance but by bad architecture and bad developers.
Always choose the best tool for the job, you rarely get to that scale and quality of software design that only the raw language performance is left to be optimized :)
Maybe the wordpress guys have done a great job in rewriting the internals and cleaning things up in the last years, I wouldn't know, I don't follow their progress.
If you build a Rails or Laravel app in the same way you would build a Java app, the Rails/Laravel app will be dead slow. And I've seen that happen. But if you know what you're doing you with Rails/Laravel it will be a long time before you say: we should rewrite this in Go/Rust/Erlang.
The main criteria for me when choosing a tool for the job is: how well does the team know the tool? can they use it at full potential?
I've been involved in java project with 20k monthly cloud costs. Most of the workload is handled in the background by consumers that pull messages from RabbitMQ. I'm pretty sure I could rebuild that with any language while actually reducing the costs because the bottleneck is not the code but the architecture. Would it matter if I would rewrite it in Java instead pf Python or Ruby, in terms of performance, yes, if we need to consider other things, like speed of development, etc it gets complicated again. :)
I see no reason to start any greenfield project in 2019 in PHP unless you literally only know or ever want to learn PHP. I could be wrong in terms of the entire language and it's ecosystem could have changed in the 18-20 years since I deliberated interacted with it last... We have a lot of things since mod php, so there's many other options, most of which don't involve PHP, so I suppose true fans will build their web apps in forth, I dunno...
Performance is a concern for many people, and this is somewhat overlooked because of the number of people here who work for companies where scaling is the primary concern. I think this is what he meant by people outside of VC-backed startups. I know of multiple companies that have had outrageous cloud-hosting bills and have had to hire fancy consultants to fix it.