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Comment by jampekka | Hacker News Reader

Python is really really slow compared to JS though.

Node is so slow to start that python script can complete before Javascript even begins to execute.

For extremely simple scripts maybe. I get around 70 ms difference in startup time.

  $ time python3 -c "print('Hello world')"
  Hello world

  real 0m0.017s

  $ time node -e "console.log('Hello world')"
  Hello world
  
  real 0m0.084s

I once worked on a Python system that had 50 machines dedicated to it. We were able to rewrite it in a more performant language such that it easily ran on one machine. This also allowed us to avoid all the issues distributed systems have.

So yeah, Python is not great for systems programming

CPython is (though it's slowly getting better). Pypy is amazingly fast

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