Python is fast compared to something? Maybe fast enough to generate HTML.
Today's HN launch of FastHTML's home page was running on a $5/month hobbyist account at Railway.app, where it averaged 1% utilization of 1 VCPU.
(The trick, as always, is to optimise the inner loops in your app as needed; often that just means using pre-existing fast libs for that bit, but sometimes you may need to reach for cython/PyO3/etc. Often you'll find you don't need anything extra. FastHTML's own home page doesn't need anything extra.)
But python doesn't prevent them from scaling either ;)
No matter what language you use, you use CDNs and caches.
With Vercel and Netlify it's just TypeScript/JavaScript: https://vercel.com/docs/functions/edge-middleware https://docs.netlify.com/edge-functions/overview/
Back in ancient times, a software project I was working in, failed, precisely because of Python performance with the Zope framework, it was too slow to render a webpage that required more than a few interesting calculations.
Today the language is almost the same, but computers have a thousand times more memory, and the CPUs are similarly faster.
The exact same project would have been successful today, just like neural networks are cornerstones of modern computing, because of the advances in hardware.
Yes, it’s glue. True for Ruby, PHP, Perl as well.
I just think it’s disingenuous to associate the word “fast” with anything implemented with it, granted that C is 70 times faster than it. I mean, me saying it’s slow compared to C is less hyperbolic than saying it’s fast.
And I think Python is perfectly adequate for plenty of use cases, so is PHP, so is Ruby. I like to be mean to JavaScript, but even that is fine for web dev.
https://www.tiobe.com/tiobe-index/
But, we can play the benchmark game, if that tops your morning cereal.
Competes with Go. Blows most popular TS frameworks out of the water.
https://www.techempower.com/benchmarks/#section=data-r22&hw=...
For you: https://gprivate.com/6chku
The bottom of the benchmark table are all slow Python implementations xD
When you get to 1% of the world population, you can switch to rust/go