Software engineer and collector of expensive hobbies.

I was /u/TortoiseWrath but then reddit imploded.

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Joined 2 years ago
Cake day: June 15th, 2023
  • TortoiseWrath@tortoisewrath.comtoProgramming@programming.dev•Does Lemmy really benefit from Rust? Is code execution speed the bottleneck?English
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    2 years ago

    Not relevant to lemmy (yet), but this does break down a bit at very large scales. (Source: am infra eng at YouTube.)

    System architecture (particularly storage) is certainly by far the largest contributor to web performance, but the language of choice and its execution environment can matter. It’s not so important when it’s the difference between using 51% and 50% of some server’s CPU or serving requests in 101 vs 100 ms, but when it’s the difference between running 5100 and 5000 servers or blocking threads for 101 vs 100 CPU-hours per second, you’ll feel it.

    Languages also build up cultures and ecosystems surrounding them that can lend themselves to certain architectural decisions that might not be beneficial. I think one of the major reasons they migrated the YouTube backend from Python to C++ isn’t really anything to do with the core languages themselves, but the fact that existing C++ libraries tend to be way more optimized than their Python equivalents, so we wouldn’t have to invest as much in developing more efficient libraries.