Interesting article. Not sure that the conclusion is all that solid though: &quot;I quantified that 1 C++ server is roughly equivalent to 40 load-balanced python servers for raw computational power based on our HTTP benchmarking. Thus using C++ can really squeeze all the computational juice out of the underlying hardware to save 1&#x2F;40 off server costs.&quot;<p>Well, for this particular start-up, I think c++ was an excellent choice (especially as they already knew c++!) -- but what if you could still run the service on a single service with python? You would still need 2-3 servers with the c++ version (failover, test etc).<p>Or it might turn out that for production load, you&#x27;d need 10 python server-instances. Sure, one server could handle this with c++ -- but you&#x27;re not actually saving 39&#x2F;40, you&#x27;re only saving 9&#x2F;10, because you didn&#x27;t need &quot;the full 40&quot;.<p>Not to mention, that it seems unlikely that the http request stuff is the limiting factor in a distributed OLAP system. So you might do 100 &quot;OLAPS&#x2F;s&quot;, and have them easily served by a 40Kreq&#x2F;s python service.<p>&quot;I guess we could have written it in Python to start off with but, economically, it would be a wastage of labor cost and time because, at some stage, we would have to scrap it for a C++ version to get the performance we need. The Python code will have no economic value once scrapped.&quot;<p>As mentioned, I think c++ was an excellent choice, but the above assumes they&#x27;d have to rewrite the entire system in c++, and scrap all the python. Granted, if you don&#x27;t know python, but do know c++ very well -- it&#x27;s doubtful that it would be faster to prototype in python than to just use c++.<p>But if (wild guesstimate) you could get 90% of the features, at 10% the loc&#x2F;dependencies in python -- who&#x27;s to say that wouldn&#x27;t make sense? Maybe parts could be done in c&#x2F;c++, or the project could move to pypy for <i>enough</i> of a speedup that no complete rewrite would be needed... etc.<p>Overall though, I really think this is a great illustration that high-performance compiled languages offer <i>great</i> performance, and can be rather pleasant to work with.