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Comment by narag | Hacker News Reader

I've been here for a while resisting the temptation to write a sarcastic comment. Speed has been the opposite of what matters for decades. Every change is always trading speed for something else. And suddenly some offer by Amazon is going to change that? Seems unlikely.

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Speed has never not mattered; whoever told you that hand waved over a ton of nuance and did you a disservice. The reality is that for a lot of work loads an increase in speed is not worth the tradeoff (key word) of increased maintenance burden.

All else being equal, faster services are cheaper to run. Faster services can service more requests per compute/memory resource, which means you don't have to buy as many servers/containers/whatever. This is particularly important if you're being billed by the ms, which is the context we're talking about here.

Speed has always mattered, though I agree we are light-years away from optimization levels once considered standard. OTOH, so are we WRT complexity of applications.

Amazon is not going to change software development per se, but at least at some of their customers' sites calculations will be done how many hours can be allocated for a n% reduction in runtime. So, if you live in an amazon-universe, this is a real "game changer". Bystanders may chuckle ;)

It sounds like you are assuming that faster code means you need to sacrifice something which has negative consequences. If you know upfront you need faster code you may choose a statically compiled language and I don't see it as a sacrifice.

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