Web Service Efficiency at Instagram with Python
If engineering time wasn't an issue, how much would a company of Instagram's scale save by switching from Python to a lower level language like C++? Pretend you could wave a magic wand and overnight have the entire code base transformed from Python to well written C++, how would that affect the hardware requirements, and future development?I guess what I'm really asking is what pros and cons are there with using dynamic and relatively slow languages compared to faster languages like C++, Java, or C#? My uninformed reaction is that it's easy for startups to get started with these easy languages but that it leads to problems when it's time to scale up. Dropbox is writing their own Python implementation, and Facebook have their PHP to C++ compiler.