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infamiatoday at 1:44 AM1 replyview on HN

> Rewriting critical software infrastructure (infostructure) to more reliable typed languages

Instagram (and Threads) is still using Django, which is even slower than Rails. Once you get to unicorn scale, your app is going to bespoke, with some microservices, and super custom stuff. If you can go faster in a gradually typed language, that can be a very good reason to choose one.

> untyped languages are not performant

Typing generally slows down languages, not speed them up because of all the additional checks that must be done. The dynamic stuff is part of what slows down languages like Python and makes them tricky to optimize.


Replies

Paracompacttoday at 2:52 AM

> Typing generally slows down languages, not speed them up because of all the additional checks that must be done.

Source? You seem to be talking about compile-time versus runtime, and I've not even heard of compile times being significantly slowed by type checking.

> The dynamic stuff is part of what slows down languages like Python and makes them tricky to optimize.

That seems to harm rather than help your previous claim. In untyped languages, in principle every object has to be treated as dynamic.