Re:Google’s robots.txt parser is now open source
by davismwfl on Monday July 01, 2019 @06:25PM
(#20330332)
To be fair, most people do not work on applications that need that level of performance.
Most of the time, and to your point, that level of performance isn't necessary so using a language that is less likely to let you take your foot off is generally the best & most correct choice. I only resort back to C/C++ when I need the pure raw performance like this parser would, or when doing embedded work. Otherwise I reach for other tools in the tool-bag that are less likely to let me maim myself unintentionally.
You're certainly right, there IS a performance difference, and in high-computing workloads, such as the one this parser is used for.
From a "regular" web developer perspective (ie. where you only a few servers/VPS's MAX) a lot of newcomers often worry about performance, and usually for most web development the answer with performance is "Yes language [here] is faster then Python/Javascript/Ruby/etc. But those languages/frameworks allow us to develop our application far faster, and ~10ms isn't an issue." Only after performance bottlenecks are discovered would we consider breaking out pieces into a lower level language.
You're completely right though, in HPC it is totally worth worrying about every millisecond, I took the wrong perspective with the implications of the performance differences.