Posted by nar001 4 hours ago
This is very surprising to me considering some of the largest sites in the world are built on Django. Instagram, Pinterest, for instance. Large parts of stripe and Robinhood are implemented with Django. Eventbrite, bitbucket. I believe even Sentry is.
All commercial products.
It's great that Django's API design allowed them to move this way easily, but they aren't actually using Django in the traditional sense because it can't handle their scale.
I've found that with the Django ORM and DRF especially, it's very easy to create a poorly performing app by following the established patterns (N+1 queries being a huge problem created by DRF serializers). You need to be extremely diligent to create something performant in this ecosystem. Not every dev team has Armin Ronacher :P
Where I work we found this exhausting, and moved on to FastAPI and ASP.NET. We make our queries much more explicit using tools like Dapper, and now a senior engineer can have a much better idea how a particular route will perform just by reading the code (obviously, we still do some profiling).
[1]: https://djangochat.com/episodes/django-instagram-carl-meyer
Also, I doubt solving Instagram-level scale issues is on the top ten list of concerns for this project. Just getting something out there and gaining users is way more important than solving far future scaling issues.
It’s a pretty large app (I think >1M lines of Python). I ran a self hosted version for several years and found it performant and pretty easy to keep running and updated.
Stripe has always been a Ruby-heavy company.
I’m afraid i am one of those people :)
It has also been acquired by Anthropic recently.
Does not look like a great choice.
You (at least I) would not think of France as having a good Open Source presence, but they do. Over the years I have heard of many good Open Source Projects coming out of France.
I sometimes wonder if it is because of French vs English Language were you hardly hear of their projects in English speaking Countries.
France has always been super heavy on open source. They even used to host Les Trophées du Libre, international open-source software competition. FramaSoft (i.e. PeerTube) and VLC are also French.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/OCaml
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Alain_Colmerauer
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/French_Institute_for_Research_... (INRIA)
Also Docker.
Also Lichess.
Also Scikit Learn.
You have not been paying attention.
Previously:
This week: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46873294
2 weeks ago: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46767668
Of course its SDK has components choosen with care to maximize alternative (present and future) availability and its code is not stored on microsoft github.com.
France dumps Zoom and Teams as Europe seeks digital autonomy from the US https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46873294
Also means that the tooling to make collaborative work in this suite possible already exists because it's a common use case on the web and less so on native software (see Microsoft Office vs. Microsoft 365 online).
These are the same reasons Google Docs took off, and they are real advantages.