> Yet another "X faster than Y" where inside X all hot jobs are done by really good-tuned C or C++. Facepalm.
This is the case for basically every programming language or performant library that exists. Yet, I never see this when discussions exists about node libraries or other languages for that matter. I mean you could argue that node itself is just a thin wrapper around fast C++ libraries.
Who the fuck cares if the request goes down to some compiled C++ library? I still write my logic in Python and get this benefit anyway. This is what makes it great.
> Yet, I never see this when discussions exists about node libraries or other languages for that matter.
Huh? It's the first comment for pretty much any of these stupid performance comparisons. Does someone really think node performance is great, or pick node because of its performance?
> I still write my logic in Python and get this benefit anyway.
That's part of the point. Writing your logic in Python is fine, but then your app performance isn't winning any comparisons. No one cares about the performance this article is explicitly talking about.
I think the issue is that there is three different types of people when it comes to performance.
There is the 1% that are in a need of hard realtime performance, that thinks about GC performance as an issue that needs to be adressed. Sure I can get that for these people, these kind of discussions seems stupid and confusing since they have to develop in C/C++, Rust etc to get the pure performance they need. These people probably aren't in this thread because they know that Python is not a language for them and will never be.
Then there is the 99% crowd, which I am a part of, that could use slow-as-shit frameworks like Rails or Laravel because the performance is just a nice-to-have. These people, like myself, compares Python perf to perhaps PHP or Node because they are fast enough languages and in this kind of league a framework like OPs can make a huge difference. No matter what language you pick here you are basically always using something "beneth" it. Node has been picked by many because it's faster than for example Python and Ruby.
Then there is the people who are part of the 99% crowd but are just have to comment and point the needs of the 1% out because they are negative people who probably produce little themselves and have to hate on what other people create and distribute for free. This group is where most haters on HN belong in. :)
I started in PHP, when I went to Node in the early beginning I was deeply impressed by the great performance and nice features it had. Sure it was built upon C++ libraries but I am never gonna use C++ to write my web api. Still, I could use Node and get 2-3x AT LEAST the performance in all of my endpoints because of this and all my code was in javascript.
What I am trying to say is that I don't care if you pack my code and run it on a computer in Minecraft or your calculator, if it runs faster for very little to no pain on my side that is pure joy to me.
NodeJS might be slow, but it still is orders of magnitude faster than any interpreted or JIT Python implementation. I agree that no one really chooses Node because it is fast, but I think they choose it because it is fast _enough_ whereas if using Python you'd probably find multiple performance bottlenecks that could be show-stoppers.
> Who the fuck cares if the request goes down to some compiled C++ library?
The way this is titled, you know someone will read this as "Python can be faster than go" and influence their decision when it comes to performance ; that's actually why I clicked on that, thinking "how the hell did they achieve faster speed with Python".
Well, it could be true IMHO. If I run my code that calls down to some ultra fast, mega well done C++ library that is much better than anything in the Go community my code then completes requests faster than the Go alternative.
If that is the case, that should influence the decision when it comes to performance. If performance is a very important deal in your app, you have to test this yourself so that you reach the performance you need.
Perhaps you can write C++ extensions to Python for the perf-heavy parts yourself instead of having to write the entire application in a language that takes much longer time to develop in?
This is the case for basically every programming language or performant library that exists. Yet, I never see this when discussions exists about node libraries or other languages for that matter. I mean you could argue that node itself is just a thin wrapper around fast C++ libraries.
Who the fuck cares if the request goes down to some compiled C++ library? I still write my logic in Python and get this benefit anyway. This is what makes it great.