The main lesson of the story. Just pick Python and move fast, kids. It doesn’t matter how fast your software is if nobody uses it.
One of the reasons the project was killed was that we couldn't port it to our line of low powered devices without a full rewrite in C.
Please note this was more than a decade ago, way before Rust was the language it was today. I wouldn't chose anything else besides Rust today since it gives the best of both worlds: a truly high level language with low level resource controls.
If you're writing FastAPI (and you should be if you're doing a greenfield REST API project in Python in 2026), just s/copy/steal/ what those guys are doing and you'll be fine.
The mentality was "the language is fast, so as long as it compiles we're good"... Yeah that worked out about as well as you'd expect.
The reason nobody uses your software could be that it is too slow. As an example, if you write a video encoder or decoder, using pure Python might work for postage-stamp sized video because today’s hardware is insanely fast, but even, it likely will be easier to get the same speed in a language that’s better suited to the task.
Almost every mainstream languages (except Go, Swift, Kotlin and Rust) are more than 30 years old, by the way.
I'd rather not use python. The ick gets me every time.
if input() == "dynamic scope?":
defined = "happyhappy"
print(defined)Most the the business I do is rewriting old working python prototypes to C++. Python sucks, is slow and leaks. The new C++ code does not leak, meets our performance requirements, processes items instead of 36 hour in 8 hours, and such.
We are also rewriting all the old python UI in typescript. That went not so easy yet.
And when there are still old simple python helpers, I rewrite them into perl, because this will continue to run in the next years, unlike python.