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Comment by brandmeyer | Hacker News Reader

This is a widely-held belief, but it isn't true. Maybe once upon a time in the land of spinning rust that was true, but it certainly isn't now. Databases are fast enough that a scripting language frequently is the performance bottleneck.

https://techspot.zzzeek.org/2015/02/15/asynchronous-python-a...

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> scripting language frequently is the performance bottleneck

I'm not sure I'd use the word "frequently" here, but I could just have a different experience. Most projects are boring CRUD stuff, and something else have always been the bottleneck before the actual language itself, most of the times different types of I/O but also just poor choice of algorithms/data structures. I don't think I've ever actually came across a situation where the language itself was the bottleneck of the performance, but I don't normally work super close to performance-sensitive projects as I said, mostly common web tasks.

Choosing a language is a significant factor towards the performance of your services.

A service built in go can req/resp up to 30x faster than one built in python.

https://www.techempower.com/benchmarks/#section=data-r20&hw=...

I know benchmarking isn't always the greatest, especially when the previous maintainer of Actix-Web (Rust) kind of cheated to get to the top of the leaderboard, but it still provides a decent general overview of how many responses/s a service can handle when using the same box.

Even if scripting language is the slowest, Ruby programmers say you need to include dev time in the equation which Ruby and Python optimize

Well, you would say that wouldn't you :-)

They get to say that because they are already done with their implementation and hanging out on HN for the rest of the afternoon.

But why are they working Sunday? ;-)

They spent the rest of the week waiting for the test suite to run.

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