> This is a case where this speed optimization actually wastes time overall.
That's too much of an absolute to be a good rule. If your heavyweight runtime is being launched 1000s of times to get a job done but you only do this once every few months, sure, don't do many optimizations, certainly don't worry about a rewrite in another language. The savings probably aren't worth it. If your heavyweight runtime is being launched 1000s of times to get a job done every day or multiple times a day, consider optimizing. Which may include changing the language. That's hardly controversial, this is the same thing we consider with every other programming task.
Is X expensive in your language and do you have to do this frequently? Then minimize X or rewrite in a language that handles it better.
> “ If your heavyweight runtime is being launched 1000s of times to get a job done every day or multiple times a day, consider optimizing. Which may include changing the language. That's hardly controversial”
No, that is controversial because the time saved per run (even 1000s of times per run with multiple daily runs) is never going to come close to amortizing the upfront sunk cost of that migration and future maintenance.
I’m specifically saying in the exact case you highlighted, people will short-sightedly think it’s a clear case to migrate out of the easy-but-slow interpreted language or never start with it to begin with, and they would be quantitatively wrong, missing the forest for the trees.
Think from the point of view of a tools/productivity engineer at a large company.
Yes, you invest some of your time to create the faster tool. Then hundreds to tens of thousands of people all use that faster tool to save time, day in and day out.
Just to put some concrete numbers to this, if you have a 100-person engineering team and you ask one of them to spend all their work time ensuring that the others are 1% more efficient than they would be otherwise (so saving each of them 5 minutes per typical 8 hour workday), you about break even. If you have a 500-person team, you come out ahead.
Now it's possible that the switch to a compiled language we are discussing would not save people 5 minutes per day, or that you don't have 100+ engineers. Obviously for a tool that only the developer of the tool will use the calculus is very different!
That's too much of an absolute to be a good rule. If your heavyweight runtime is being launched 1000s of times to get a job done but you only do this once every few months, sure, don't do many optimizations, certainly don't worry about a rewrite in another language. The savings probably aren't worth it. If your heavyweight runtime is being launched 1000s of times to get a job done every day or multiple times a day, consider optimizing. Which may include changing the language. That's hardly controversial, this is the same thing we consider with every other programming task.
Is X expensive in your language and do you have to do this frequently? Then minimize X or rewrite in a language that handles it better.