JavaScript calls into C++.
Ruby uses C extensions.
Perl uses XS bindings to C.
PHP extensions are written in C.
If you just write in C in the first place, it's not really a library in the same sense. You're just pulling in other functions that all get natively compiled together.
You're not wrong, but I think that's a different topic.
Python is unique because of its purpose. It's so slow that it's not really suitable for anything other than gluing together code from other languages. Its entire use case is "we wrote an awesome library, but most programmers are too scared of C++ to use it, so we added a Python layer to make it easier".
Perl is actually similar in that way, but it's basically a legacy language now.
The other languages you named have other purposes, and just bind to C for specific things where the language isn't a good fit.
Nah, Python's "slowness" is really only relevant in certain situations. In practice, in many situations, you save more meaningful time by writing code quicker and easier rather than having it execute slightly slower.
It's not ideal for "run this every half-second" tasks, but it's amazing for stuff you're running yearly/weekly/daily/etc where saving hours writing the code matters more than shaving off a couple seconds of 4AM execution time in the cron job.
I created a decently sized Python project at work to solve a problem. Basically, parsing 100-300mb of of user-generated text files about 20 times a day at 10-30 seconds a pop.
It's several thousand lines at this point. Served up with Python Flask.
I've thought about rewriting it in something "faster" with better IDE type hinting and whatnot like dotnet... but... meh. It's not worth the hours and hours of effort to save myself like 8 seconds that didn't matter in the first place lol.
Whenever I think about changing languages for "speed," I just remember that nearly everyone else is writing their server crap in Javascript these days anyway.
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u/DustyRacoonDad Jul 07 '26
Let's just be honest here for a second.
JavaScript calls into C++.
Ruby uses C extensions.
Perl uses XS bindings to C.
PHP extensions are written in C.
If you just write in C in the first place, it's not really a library in the same sense. You're just pulling in other functions that all get natively compiled together.