Sure, Rust is fast, but Python is really, aggressively slow. They could rewrite in basically any compiled language (or even some of the dynamic ones) and come out way ahead. It's such a frustrating experience trying to wring halfway decent performance out of a project written in Python when the lowest level fundamental operations like "accessing a property on an object" and "looping" are performance landmines.
Basic context seems like an ideal opportunity for a rewrite. Other benefits besides speedup in the article.<p>> The project we are developing using Rust is called KCL. (KCL) is an open-source constraint-based record and functional language. It improves the writing of complex configurations through a mature programming language stack.<p>> KCL was written in Python before.
> We used Python, Go, and Rust to implement a simple programming language stack virtual machine and compared their performance. In this scenario, Go and Rust have similar performance, while Python showed a significant performance gap. After careful consideration, we chose Rust.<p>Would have been interesting to hear why they didn't benchmark other languages suited to programming language implementation. Go is obviously rather weak in expressivity there, and other options which have both automatic memory management and high performance exist.<p>But the 66% bottom line performance improvement does sound like a nice improvement.
We rewrote our project with <insert compiled language> and it's almost <insert number>X faster<p>Well, than Python. Who would have thought that?