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Comment by axelf | Hacker News Reader

why were they using python for performance critical code in the first place? Go seems closer to java's niche to me.

Disqus was originally built on Django: http://blog.disqus.com/post/62187806135/scaling-django-to-8-...

It seems that this is what the found team was most comfortable with, so it makes sense that they proceeded to solve problems using tools they already knew well. At some point, they exhausted how far they could take their existing tools and started investing into new tools.

What Go web framework did they move to?

We're not using a framework. This is a tiny component and the rest of Disqus is still Django.

It doesn't say, but probably none. My guess would be they just used "net/http" + Gorilla (maybe). Gorilla: http://www.gorillatoolkit.org/

Given it sounds like this application is not "web facing" (i.e. not an API nor rendering HTML), the use of any "web framework" or Gorilla doesn't make much sense.

I write back-end stuff like this all the time and it often has admin interfaces.

I imagine at their size they're using raw Go without any framework.

They had a fairly popular post on the subject a while back:

http://blog.disqus.com/post/62187806135/scaling-django-to-8-...

In short, since they were not really pushing volume with Python, just feeding data to Varnish, throughput wasn't such a big deal.

Yes, why is Go constantly compared to Python?

For me, it felt comfortable writing Go, considering I've been mostly writing Python for the past 8 years. So the transition was a lot more natural, compared to using Scala or Erlang or anything else.

Again, this is my subjective opinion, and this is why we chose to use Go for our new stuff instead of something different.

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