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).
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.
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).