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- Hacker News
- Django is massive and ton of baggage to be carrying if you are only doing REST APIs.
This sounds like standard case going with what developers know instead of evaluating tool for job.
by stackskipton - "Python async sucks", then rants about django
"Python doesn't have native async file I/O." - like almost everybody, as "sane" file async IO on Linux is somehow new (io_uring)
Anyway ..
by JackSlateur - I don't see it mentioned enough in the comments here, but not considering Celery as an alternative to Django + async really is the missing puzzle piece here. Aside from application-level options that weren't explored, I'm wondering whether handling some of the file IO stuff with, for instance, nginx, might be a better fit for their use case.
Once you're in the situation of supporting a production system with some of the limitations mentioned, you also owe it to yourself to truly evaluate all available options. A rewrite is rarely the right solution. From an engineering standpoint, assuming you knew the requirements pretty early on, painting yourself into a bad enough corner to scrap the whole thing and pick a new language gives me significant pause for thought.
In all honesty I consider a lot of this blog post to be a real cause for concern -- the tone, the conflating arguments (if your tests were bad before, just revisit them), the premature concern around scaling. It really feels like they may have jumped to an expensive conclusion without adequate research.
In an interview, I would not advance a candidate like this. If I had a report who exhibited this kind of reasoning, I'd be drilling them on fundamentals and double-checking their work through the entire engineering process.
- As a long-time Django user, I would not use Django for this. Django async is probably never the right choice for a green-field project. I would still pick FastAPI/SQLAlchemy over Express and PostHog. There is no way 15 different Node ORMs are going to survive in the long run, plus Drizzle and Prisma seem to be the leaders for now.by megaman821
- Same experience working on FastAPI projects. I don’t know how big production apps are maintained (and supported operationally) with the mess that is python+async+types.
Conversely all the node+typescript projects, big and small, have been pretty great the last 10+ years or so. (And the C# .NET ones).
I use python for real data projects, for APIs there are about half a dozen other tech stacks I’d reach for first. I’ll die on this hill these days.
by davedx - Folks, if you have problems doing async work, and most of your intense logic/algorithms is a network hop away (LLMs, etc.), do yourself a favor and write a spike in Elixir. Just give it a shot.
The whole environment is built for async from the ground up. Thousands and thousands of hours put into creating a runtime and language specifically to make async programming feasible. The runtime handles async IO for you with preemptive scheduling. Ability to look at any runtime state on a production instance. Lovely community. More libraries than you might expect. Excellent language in Elixir.
Give it a shot.
by asa400 - Async and Django don't mix well and I honestly see the whole Django Async as wasted resources, all those "a" prefixed functions etc.
To be honest, I never liked the way async is done in python at all.
However, I love Django and Python in general. When I need "async" in a http cycle flow, I use celery and run it in background.
If client side needs to be updated about the state of the background task, the best is to send the data to a websocket channel known to the client side. Either it's Chat response with LLM or importing a huge CSV file.
Simple rule for me is, "don't waste HTTP time, process quick and return quick".
by Alir3z4 - I'm really torn -- you and your engineers should be excited to work on your codebase. You should enter it and be like "yes, I've made good choices and this is a codebase I appreciate, and it has promise." If you have a set of storylines that make this migration appropriate, and its still early in the company that you can even do this in 3 days, then by all means, do it! And good luck. It'll never be cheaper to do it, and you are going to be "wearing" it for your company's lifetime.
But a part of me is reading this and thinking "friend... if PostHog was able to do what they're doing on the stack you're abandoning, do you think that stack is actually going to limit your scalability in any way that matters?" Like, you have the counterexample right there! Other companies are making the "technically worse" choice but making it work.
I love coding and I recognize that human beings are made of narratives, but this feels like 3 days you could have spent on customer needs or feature dev or marketing, and instead you rolled around in the code mud for a bit. It's fine to do that every now and then, and if this was a more radical jump (e.g. a BEAM language like Elixir or Gleam, or hell, even Golang, which has that preemptive scheduler + fast compiles/binary deploys + designed around a type system...) than I'd buy it more. And I'm not in your shoes so it's easy to armchair quarterback. But it smells a bit like getting in your head on technical narratives that are more fun to apply your creativity to, instead of the ones your company really needs.
by srpablo