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Unladen Swallow started as an intership project and didn't get very much support at Google [1]. When US started (~2009), Google had been writing their core, hig
by ihnorton 12y ago
Unladen Swallow started as an intership project and didn't get very much support at Google [1]. When US started (~2009), Google had been writing their core, high-performance stuff in Java and C++ for many years already so there was no internal or existential need to make Python faster.
[1] http://qinsb.blogspot.com/2011/03/unladen-swallow-retrospective.html http://qinsb.blogspot.com/2011/03/unladen-swallow-retrospect...
- ZenoArrow 12y agoOn the other hand, there may have been applications higher up the stack that would've benefited from a more efficient Python. I don't know if it still is but I heard GMail was written in Python, you'd think an application of that scale would benefit from better performance.
- ihnorton 12y agoThe internet says it is written in Java: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gmail http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gmail (possibly with some Python build tools, for which performance doesn't matter)
- mike_hearn 12y agoThe Gmail frontend is Java. The backend (mail routing, spam filtering, virus checking and parts of storage etc) is C++.