I've never heard of performance being one of Alpine's benefits - in fact quite the opposite. There are many blogposts talking about run-time perf being dramatic

I've never heard of performance being one of Alpine's benefits - in fact quite the opposite. There are many blogposts talking about run-time perf being dramatically slower. Also, you lose some security benefits with Alpine as well because of the use of musl. As for tooling this might've been true 4-5 years ago but I don't think it's the case anymore, but being someone that works at a unikernel company I'm clearly 100% biased. As for the scripting languages that you might be alluding to here, you are quite correct that performance has never been a strong suit with them as they are inherently shackled to single process/single thread execution. The reason why is that you could write a 2000 line ruby class named Dog and instantly rename it in one fell swoop to an integer with the value of 42. However, this is the same thing with unikernels and lots of languages such as python/ruby/node/etc. work out of the box - scaling is done differently though. Instead of firing up X app workers behind a reverse proxy you fire up X vms and put that behind a load balancer.