Languages and system evolution

In the last decade, scripting languages gained popularity to the point at which some had significant performance improvement and entire systems were built with them. For example, let's just think about the V8 Engine for JavaScript and the PyPy implementation of Python, which dramatically shifted the performance of these languages.

Other languages, such as Go, proved that garbage collection and performance are not mutually exclusive. In particular, Go managed to replace its own memory allocator written in C with a native version written in Go in release 1.5, improving it to the point where the performance was comparable.

In the meantime, systems started to get distributed and the applications started to get shipped in containers, orchestrated by other system software, such as Kubernetes. These systems are meant to sustain huge throughput and achieve it in two main ways:

• By scaling—augmenting the number or the resources of the machines that are hosting the system
• By optimizing the software in order to be more resource effective