My response TBH, would be that there is no point spending months tweaking the engine of a ford to try and get it to perform like a porche. Just get a porche in the first place.

I don't value "being able to write it in my favorite language" at all. From what I've read, pg does. To the extent that the product suffers.

There would be absolutely no point me trying to improve mzScheme when you can do exactly the same job in other languages/platforms, and the user doesn't care/know the difference. HN could be rewritten in a weekend, in PHP/python/whatever and we wouldn't be sitting here waiting for pages to load.

(I run Mibbit, which handles a few thousand HTTP requests a second, on VPS level hardware. In Java).

Neither Python nor PHP run garbage collection continuously in a separate thread. Python is reference counted, and as far as I know PHP is too.

But I'd bet both of them perform far better than MzScheme.

In any event, it's a "solved problem". The sheer amount of time and effort going into this is silly. Just pick a better language/platform and use it.

I guess the point is, axod, if you aren't willing to backup talk with action, it might be best to think about what you say before you say it.

Don't slam something saying I could do better, and then have your bluff called.

Makes you look silly. This applies to even if the person calling your bluff was NOT pg.

It depends on what you mean by "perform better". Any reference-counted GC mechanism will have memory leaks, which is a serious problem in a long-running process. Python gets around this by also occasionally running a traditional GC, which, btw, is a stop-the-world GC.

Of course you can write a link aggregator in a weekend, but you can't write HN in a weekend - there's a lot of complexity in the HN source around controlling voting rings, spam, etc. When you're dealing with complex issues, it's a net win to use a language that enables you to think at the highest level of abstraction possible.