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Comment by flavio81 | Hacker News Reader

> Express might be 100% faster than Rails but it will take you 5 days just to get something running vs what you can do with Rails in a matter of minutes.

You should compare Express to Sinatra, not to Rails.

Express is ridiculously easy to learn, btw. Coming from Flask (under Python), i learnt Express in 3 hours. Seriously.

> Regarding the fast/slow it's simply bull-crarp, seriously. It DOES NOT matter for 99% of us. It simply doesn't.

Speed DOES (caps, emphasis) matters for many projects, in particular the projects that will go to real-life, to get massive use by consumers/common people. However, I do agree that for prototyping, startups, or simple apps that don't demand lots of performance, the speed of development under Ruby and its tools is a very important asset.

> I don't get the hate that Ruby and Rails are getting. Really don't.

Agree with you, one shouldn't "hate" Ruby, no reason, really.

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The express <> Rails comparison was not meant to be a feature to feature one. I did not explain myself correctly.

The point on the speed for me wasn't that speed as a whole doesn't matter. Speed in the language level doesn't matter.

If you do stupid shit with rails it will take 5.1 seconds and if you do stupid shit with Golang it will take 5.05 seconds. It simply doesn't matter all that much in the language/framework level for most of us.

For example: In my current job place we are using Flask for all microservices. One of the endpoints was very slow to respond and took 3 seconds. It ended up being a missing index in the DB.

Once fixed it's taking 20ms.

So, Is python slow because it's taking 20ms vs 12ms?

> If you do stupid shit with rails it will take 5.1 seconds and if you do stupid shit with Golang it will take 5.05 seconds.

Honestly, if you do the same stupid shit with Go, it will take 0.51 seconds, according to many benchmarks out there.

> So, Is python slow because it's taking 20ms vs 12ms?

No, bad code is bad code. But on companies that have good programmers, sometimes you do hit a performance problem caused by the platform, and then you have to either a. throw more money (more servers, more CPU cores, more mem), or b. rewrite that section in other language. Actually, for example this is what some Python libraries do, for example Numpy has a lot of code actually implemented in C, not python.

> Honestly, if you do the same stupid shit with Go, it will take 0.51 seconds, according to many benchmarks out there

The whole point is that CPU-bound web framework time is never the bottleneck for most companies. Golang doesn't change your database network latency.

If you DO hit the rare cpu bottleneck, you can offload it to services, cffi, whatever. It's so astonishingly rare that it doesn't make sense to optimize for most of the time.

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