I think for large scale web apps a combination of low level C++ with a high level UI frameworks is a pretty good choice.

Thanks again for the links.

christopher: i actually think you argued the case both effectively and quite rationally. you’re clearly not a bigot, as your Python usage attests to, nor are you wrong that folks like Google and Yahoo get a lot of mileage and performance out of C++. in the Yahoo case, however, the C++ is the base layer, PHP as i understand it the standard on the presentation side.

i’m totally with you on the concurrency point; there’s a reason people are talking about Erlang, after all.

I’m not all that religious about this. I do think it is good to have some real datapoints. It will be interesting to see if there are any reports of projects hitting a wall on Rails scalability in the next year. I think the concurrency point is more of a serious issue than the data structure performance, but time will tell.

Check out my latest post. I might have to take back my previous claims about python/ruby performance on a technicality. The reason smalltalk was looking so good was that it uses linked lists to implement lists, not because the VM is inheriently faster.

BTW, I like C++ because I can choose to go low level or stay high leve without leaving the language. C++ isn’t popular these days, but I think with the right framework it could be a decent web development platform.

The way I look at it is that both Google and Bloglines have proven scalable and both are written with a bunch of C/C++ code.

BTW, C++ really doesn’t have a lot to do with C these days. With the boost libraries you can get a lot of off the shelf functionality.

Or, maybe we could all start using Smalltalk and Lisp…

Or on the third hand which I’ve recently had surgically added, maybe we can get some kinda crazy ass VM that’s super super fast and has high level implementations of all the crazy ass compiler tricks that make those dynamic languages so fast.

Want Tail recursion? *bam* mix in the Trampoline module!