I seem to remember hearing this story: Back in the 2000s, Google did all their back-end stuff in C++ to make sure it was performant, and when they acquired Youtube they found it was made in Python, slow to run, fast to develop.

[–] victorz@lemmy.world 5 points 1 day ago (2 children)

Did they change it after the acquisition? Or is python why it's still so freaking slow?

[–] boonhet@sopuli.xyz 6 points 1 day ago (2 children)

Lol @ YouTube being slow

Look at the amount of data that goes through their servers every millisecond. It's ridiculous. All things considered, YouTube is lightning fast.

Maybe the UI isn't as snappy as it could be, but the blame there lies solely on throwing more and more javascript at it to add "features" that end users don't really want.

[–] victorz@lemmy.world 2 points 1 day ago

Aaand artificially slowing down video loading by several seconds, last but not least.

[–] CheesyFox@lemmy.sdf.org 1 points 1 day ago (1 children)

is it tho? Or youtub is just profitable enough to neglect the compute overhead cost?

[–] BuboScandiacus@mander.xyz 1 points 14 hours ago

YouTube is surprisingly not very profitable

[–] sping@lemmy.sdf.org 4 points 21 hours ago* (last edited 21 hours ago) (1 children)

Things is you don't crunch numbers in Python code, you do that in libraries called from Python.

It's a few statements of orchestration and any heavy lifting is encapsulated compiled code.

You don't do tight loops on Python, or if you do you're using it wrong.

[–] victorz@lemmy.world 1 points 15 hours ago

This was mostly tongue in cheek, probably not very clear 😅

But yeah, fully agree with you.