Reason 2 – Language Performance Matters For many applications, the programming language is simply the glue between the app and the database. The performance of

Reason 2 – Language Performance Matters For many applications, the programming language is simply the glue between the app and the database. The performance of the language itself usually doesn’t matter much. Stream, however, is an API provider powering a feeds and chat platform for 700 companies and more than 500 million end users. We’ve been optimizing Cassandra, PostgreSQL, Redis, etc. for years, but eventually, you reach the limits of the language you’re using. Python is a great language but its performance is pretty sluggish for use cases such as serialization/deserialization, ranking and aggregation. We frequently ran into performance issues where Cassandra would take 1ms to retrieve the data and Python would spend the next 10ms turning it into objects.