The Industry choice

[Alex Martelli]

Paul Rubin <http://phr.cx@NOSPAM.invalid> wrote:

> aleaxit at yahoo.com (Alex Martelli) writes:
> > Well, Google's market capitalization must be around 50 billion dollars
> > or more, in the range of the top-100 companies, I believe, and they've
> > never kept their Python use a secret.  
> 
> They use Python for a lot of internal tools but their high-volume
> services are written in C++.

I thought the "webcrawling" and updating of the indices/databases/caches
(high-volume, but not latency-critical) was coded in Python, the
latency-critical part (essentially that where every fraction of a second
counts, because a human user might be waiting for an answer), such as
queries to those DBs, in C++ -- based on the idea that you can "always"
(well, if you've got the right underlying data structures, of course,
and if the problems you're solving are as "embarassingly parallel" as
these would seem to be) enhance throughput by throwing more HW at the
problem, but latency doesn't yield to such treatment.  But, I could be
wrong, of course; I don't recall where I may have read these details,
and the throughput vs latency issue is a well-known general
consideration, so I may simply have "bridged" these in my mind.


Alex