Why does anyone write web apps in Python? PHP? Ruby?

Modern Java and Go are so much faster than the alternatives that it's stupid to consider anything else if performance is important.

Golang and Java can manage over a half million HTTP responses a second. Node is pretty fast but why bother when Java is many times more mature in features, tooling, and and supports concurrency... And uses less ram and is usually faster. People moan about the "huge" Java runtime when JavaScript uses 3-5x more memory and has a huge runtime of its own.

All the big companies are using Java and Go almost exclusively for high volume endpoints and it blows my mind the amount of mental gymnastics some companies go through to avoid following suit.

Java has come a long way since J2EE. These days it's asynchronous, non-blocking, serverless, etc.. pretty much all the acronyms thrown around about node except its not JavaScript, which IMO is a huge win.

adambard

The answer is that for a huge variety of software, performance is not important, or perhaps is only important for a subset of the application.

My personal experience is that the dynamic languages you've laid out generally have frameworks that are extremely conducive to rapid prototyping (Django is my favorite). I've seen and done the dance many times -- start with a Django/Rails/Laravel app, get a free admin and build up some CRUD pages in no time flat, and then once you've got enough traffic to care, move parts of the application to more performant platforms (Go/JVM usually) as necessary.

Jach

Yeah, plus even if performance is important, the app layer isn't necessarily the best place to optimize. It doesn't really matter how fast you sprint between database calls if the database and its IO dominate your site's performance profile, which they often do...

slackingoff2017

This just isn't true on any decently designed system I've seen. Practically any database can manage 5k complex-ish queries per second. For the common simple queries closer to 50k.

Good luck getting more than 100 calls per second out of the slow languages

Jach

If you start getting into decently designed systems territory, you're still going to have trouble beating some of the stuff that comes out of the Python/Lisp/Node communities. For instance: https://magic.io/blog/asyncpg-1m-rows-from-postgres-to-pytho...

Anyway, if you're locally looping for hundreds/thousands of queries to the database, instead of writing one query or calling a stored procedure, you're probably doing things wrong.

slackingoff2017

I'm talking about API calls where you make a few database queries, not local or batched.

Java/Go with pretty much any database can manage about 50,000 individual queries+REST calls a second.

Jach

Ah I see. I still think if you're measuring that way, there's no reason languages like Python et al. can't accomplish similar too. And if they can't, well, there's always adding more machines. Horizontal scaling tends to occur no matter what you're using, so is the argument just that with less productive (probably a matter of taste for many at this point) languages you'll have to scale out later? That's a tradeoff to consider, but there are other tradeoffs too.

https://www.techempower.com/benchmarks/#section=data-r14&hw=... has some interesting benchmarks, apparently we should be using Dart or C++. Go does slightly better than JS but not a lot. Some newer Python frameworks aren't on there yet. None of them reach near 50k, but I don't know the details of the benchmark and they aren't all using the same DB. Certainly you can get crazy numbers depending on what you're testing. e.g. https://github.com/squeaky-pl/japronto gets one million requests per second through async and pipelining but those requests aren't doing much.