Lots of very smart people have worked very hard on Python tools written in Python, yet the rust rewrites of those tools are so much faster. Sometimes it really is the programming language.
- easier concurrency. - the fact that things are actually getting rewritten with the purpose of speeding them up. - a lot of the JS tooling getting speedups deals with heavily with string parsing, tokenizing, generating and manipulation of ASTs. Being able to have shared references to slices of strings, carefully manage when strings are copied, and have strict typing of the AST nodes you enable things to be much faster than JavaScript.
So yeah, Python is not great for systems programming
$ time python3 -c "print('Hello world')"
Hello world
real 0m0.017s
$ time node -e "console.log('Hello world')"
Hello world
real 0m0.084sAlso, this was a thing before Rust. I've rewritten several things in C or Cpp for python back ends, and most pytbon performance-critical code is already an API to a shared library. You'd be surprised to run OR tools and find Fortran libraries loaded by your python code.
Yes, I agree that is very sad
Python is achingly slow. I know the Python people want to address this, I do not understand. Python makes sense as a scripting/job control language, and execution speed does not matter.
As an application development language it is diabolical. For a lot of reasons, not just speed
(but of course, the vast majority of the code, even in widely used tools, isn't properly designed for optimization in the first place)
I only dabble in javascript, but `tsc` is abominable.
So?
Some tool got written and did its job sufficiently well that it became a bottleneck worth optimizing.
That's a win.
"Finishing the task" is, by far, the most difficult thing in programming. And the two biggest contributors to that are 1) simplicity of programming language and 2) convenience of ecosystem.
Python and Javascript are so popular because they tick both boxes.
From my point of view, I'm happy if I can convince my juniors to learn a scripting language. Okay? I don't care which one--any one. I'd prefer that they learn one of the portable ones but even PowerShell is fine.
I have seen sooooo many junior folks struggle for days to do something that is 10 lines in any scripting language.
Those folks who program but don't know a scripting language far outnumber the rest of us.
> Those folks who program but don't know a scripting language far outnumber the rest of us.
What domain are you in? This sounds like the complete inverse of every company I've ever worked at.
Entire products are built on Python, Node ect, and the time after the initial honeymoon phase (if it exists) is spent retrofitting types on top in order to get a handle, any handle, on the complexity that arises without static analysis and compile time errors.
At around the same time, services start OOM'ming left and right, parallellism=1 becomes a giant bottleneck, JIT fails in one path bringing the service performance down an order of magnitude every now and then etc...
> Congratulations on being a programming god. This discussion isn't for you.
On the behalf of mediocre developers everywhere, a lot of us prefer statically typed languages because we are mediocre; I cannot hold thousands of implicit types and heuristics in my head at the same time. Luckily, the type system can.