The loss of human time in big corporations is immense. Coordination overhead and losses due to information logistics problems. I'd imagine a project like this with no dependencies on the rest of the stack can be run efficiently. From a bang per buck point of view it might beat other means (rewrite, using multiple languages, redoing ops to run on cheaper backbone) by a huge factor.

I get your sunk cost objection, but it's a bit depressing to hear people worry about someone doing genuinely useful work. Nobody wants to take responsibility or get their hands dirty. There's still plenty of low-hanging fruit in both language implementations and databases. The world today is just mountains upon mountains of bullshit.

Creating and sharing powerful tools for people to build the things that they want to exist is kinda in Shopify's DNA.

It's also important to me to give back to open source. It's done so much for us.

Well they have one of the bigger ruby/rails deployments so a 10% perf increase benefits them quite a bit.