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Software is slow because of bad design, not slow languages (www.seangoedecke.com)
submitted 5 days ago by to c/programming@programming.dev
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[–] 6 points 4 days ago (6 children)

The title itself is provably wrong. Take the Matrix spec / protocol, install Synapse (written in Python) and watch your 16GB ram, 4 cors shit itself live under 0 load; or run tuwunel (written in Rust) and watch it using 100MB of RAM and a single core while handling a hundred users (Dendrite written in go was also great but it's incomplete). Same for some Mastodon implementations, even Elixir wasn't great and I was disappointed.

Now if you are building some ETL or a thin API wrapper, where the bottleneck is somewhere else like a DB or another API, then yes, don't bother, Python would do.

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  • [–] 16 points 3 days ago (2 children)

    I hate these kinds of comments that have no other purpose than to sling shit and start arguments.

    Since this is a programming community (and giving you the benefit of the doubt, I assume you're not a vibe coder), you know your argument is nonsense. Writing something in Python doesn't automatically make it slow or use a lot of RAM or whatever. Synapse is shitty because Synapse is shitty. You can write slow and inefficient software in any language, and it feels really tedious to type this out because it's obvious and common sense.

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  • [–] 1 point 3 days ago

    You can write slow and inefficient software in any language

    Yes, but you can't write snappy fast software in any language, high level languages like python, lua and php carry alot of overhead from the get go, because of dynamic typing, heavy abstractions, and heavy garbage collectors.

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  • [–] -4 points 3 days ago

    Your entire comment adds nothing, like 0 value. I provided two counter examples of verifiable, publicly available, familiar to tech people and programmers projects people can inspect now. Your comment doesn't even bother to bring something real, an LLM could put together a better counter argument by actually inspecting the github repos.

    Synapse is shitty

    I get the feeling you are wasting everyone's time and you have no idea what are you talking about. Show us your cooler projects?

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  • [–] 5 points 3 days ago (1 child)

    I don't think you're making the kind of argument you intended to make. Those are two different programs with two different development teams behind them. The design behind them (the literal thing the article is talking about) are likely completely different from each other. Comparing the languages based on two different implementations of the same spec is a bit more than disingenuous. If you want to actually compare you need to recreate the same implementation as closely as feasible. Something like this https://youtu.be/WB7v-ezqcJM

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