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Comment by infamia | Hacker News Reader

> Rewriting critical software infrastructure (infostructure) to more reliable typed languages

Instagram (and Threads) is still using Django, which is even slower than Rails. Once you get to unicorn scale, your app is going to bespoke, with some microservices, and super custom stuff. If you can go faster in a gradually typed language, that can be a very good reason to choose one.

> untyped languages are not performant

Typing generally slows down languages, not speed them up because of all the additional checks that must be done. The dynamic stuff is part of what slows down languages like Python and makes them tricky to optimize.

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> Typing generally slows down languages, not speed them up because of all the additional checks that must be done.

Source? You seem to be talking about compile-time versus runtime, and I've not even heard of compile times being significantly slowed by type checking.

> The dynamic stuff is part of what slows down languages like Python and makes them tricky to optimize.

That seems to harm rather than help your previous claim. In untyped languages, in principle every object has to be treated as dynamic.

> You seem to be talking about compile-time versus runtime

Yes 100%! I was talking runtime in reference to Ruby and later Python.

> That seems to harm rather than help your previous claim. In untyped languages, in principle every object has to be treated as dynamic.

It is rather confusing and even counterintuitive, but being dynamic does not mean a language must also be untyped. For example, Python is both strongly typed and dynamically typed at once. [1] It's objects have a definitive type, but you can swap out objects of any type out at any time (a=1 ... a="foo") using the same variable. That makes optimization rather tricky as you can imagine.

1 - https://wiki.python.org/moin/Why%20is%20Python%20a%20dynamic...

> I've not even heard of compile times being significantly slowed by type checking.

Look at Swift. But yeah, Swift is the only language I've ever heard having compile time issues because of the type checking.

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