Cinder: Instagram's performance-oriented fork of CPython
I love how Facebook and Instagram never went the route of "full rewrite" for their apps as they scaled.<p>I my experience "Language X is slow and we could save Y switching to Z" is always a false promise. You can pick parts of the system that are costing a lot and port them to other language/frameworks to capture the bulk of savings while keeping your developers happy working on familiar code. Or if you'e big enough like Facebook, you can go see why X is slow and if it is possible to improve at the compiler level. Never disrupt the developers flow (Twitter did this with their Scala craze back in the day)