Re:Django plugins you shouldn't start without
by zzzeek on Saturday November 02, 2013 @08:10PM
(#6661461)
the perspective is, if you can be 20% more productive in Python vs. Go due to the ecosystem and style of Python, you can spend all the money you save in development costs on a few more servers to offset whatever performance penalties you find. I'm not sure what benchmarks you're looking at, but in the real world Python provides the infrastructure for extremely high volume sites like Reddit, Dropbox, Hulu and a crapload more.
That's not to say runtime performance issues have no effect, for example if you had some kind of algorithmic server at the center of a high frequency trading system or something like that, then benchmarks might be more critical (in which case write that one service in Go or C, then have your Python infrastructure talk to it via REST or as a C extension). It kind of depends on what you're doing but in the vast majority of business cases, it's not.
Pypy is also a great alternative to cPython which I hope starts to become viable for widespread production usage very soon - it features performance a lot more like the JVM.
That's not to say runtime performance issues have no effect, for example if you had some kind of algorithmic server at the center of a high frequency trading system or something like that, then benchmarks might be more critical (in which case write that one service in Go or C, then have your Python infrastructure talk to it via REST or as a C extension). It kind of depends on what you're doing but in the vast majority of business cases, it's not.
Pypy is also a great alternative to cPython which I hope starts to become viable for widespread production usage very soon - it features performance a lot more like the JVM.