Comment by llm_nerd
17 hours ago
Using python for a purpose like this is extremely strange -- it clearly is just technology debt they've been carrying around from a silly decision over a decade ago -- so someone mentioned a contemporary, more acceptable alternative. I don't really see why this threatens some people, much less the incredibly stupid "religious" nonsense.
Rust has lots of inertia behind it, a fantastic core library, fantastic concurrency and scalability and excellent LLM support. If someone were greenfield building a service like this today, instead of being bound by poor decisions in the past, had infinite knowledge of every toolset and language and option, there is a very good chance they would settle on Rust. They might not, but it's definitely a finalist. So not remotely surprising someone would mention it.
That this caused someone to flip out is hilarious though.
> it clearly is just technology debt they've been carrying around from a silly decision over a decade ago
Almost three decades ago—development started in 1999 and the game was released in 2003.
This is a weird conversation. Python was a strange choice back then, but is now probably the most popular programming language in existence. If anything the choice of Python (and C++) was remarkable foresight / luck.
If Eve were green-fielded today, there is a 0% chance they would choose Python anywhere in the service layer for an online game. Zero chance.
Python is a fantastic "glue" programming language. A duct-tape language. It's awesome for little scripts, or for gluing together some AI scripts, where you're basically atomically gluing a series of calls to giant native C/C++ libraries like pytorch that are then doing a series of calls to giant native C/C++ libraries like CUDA. Where the overhead of python is negligible compared to some heavy lifting being done by a better language/system.
The simple fact that we're talking about a service that was stuck on Python 2 two decades after it was replaced, half a decade after it was fully deprecated, reveals this to be 100% just debt. The fact that they talk about millions of lines of Python code, and that Python 3 represents a big speedup for their operations, again betrays it to be nothing but debt. They have Python code in the critical flow, not just as a light glue over intensive code, and they have almost certainly spent untold dollars on extra hardware, delivering a worse experience for their users, because they had a "python enthusiast" in a critical position decades ago.