Rust – A hard decision pays off
&gt; Dev velocity, which was supposed to be the claim to fame of Python, improved dramatically with Rust.<p>I don&#x27;t doubt this in the least. I&#x27;ve been a professional Python developer for 15 years, and I can&#x27;t believe Python ever had the reputation for &quot;high dev velocity&quot; beyond toy examples. In every real world code base I&#x27;ve worked in, Python has been a strict liability and the promise that you can &quot;just rewrite the slow parts in C&#x2F;C++&#x2F;Numpy&#x2F;etc&quot; has never held (you very often spend at least as much time marshaling the data to the target language format than you gain by processing in the faster language <i>and</i> you have all of the maintainability problems of C&#x2F;C++&#x2F;Numpy). Python trades developer velocity for poor runtime performance.<p>I don&#x27;t think Rust is the paragon of high dev velocity languages either, but it seems to be more predictable. You don&#x27;t have something that works as a prototype, but then you run into a bunch of performance problems (which virtually cannot be worked around) when you go to productionize, nor do you get all of the emergent quality and maintainability issues that come about from a dynamic type system (and last I checked, Python&#x27;s optional static type system was still pretty alpha-grade).<p>I strongly recommend avoiding Python for new projects. Use Go if you&#x27;re looking for an easy GC language with max productivity and a decent performance ceiling. Use Rust if you&#x27;re writing really high performance or correctness-is-paramount software. I&#x27;m sure there are other decent options as well (I&#x27;ve heard generally good things about TypeScript, but I&#x27;d be concerned about its performance even if it is better than Python).