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Rewriting in Rust won't fix a slow app, profiling will.
Sean Goedecke's post this week says software is slow because of design, not language. The Lobsters thread answers with people who rewrote Ruby or Python services in C# and cut their server count. Both are right, and they're talking about different apps.
Most of what I build is scrapers, PDF extraction and APIs in Python, and the profile usually says the same thing: the process is waiting on the network or on a database that gets called once per row. The wins come from running requests concurrently, caching what doesn't change and turning twenty queries into one. Python's share of the wall clock is rarely what I fix first.
When CPU is the bottleneck, the heavy part already runs in C: the OCR, the PDF parsing, the model. A rewrite earns its cost on the hot loop the profile points at, and almost never on the whole program.
If you've rewritten a service in a faster language, did you profile the old one first, and what did it blame?
The article: https://www.seangoedecke.com/software-is-slow-because-of-bad-design-not-slow-languages and the thread: https://lobste.rs/s/hd72yt/software_is_slow_because_bad_design_not
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QuoteDesk: instant quotes for a cleaning company, and the follow-ups nobody has time to send.
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The old site scored 45/100 on performance and took 6.2 seconds to load. With a launch about to send thousands of people to one page, that was the real risk. Not the design.
So speed came first. We built 30+ custom Framer components and kept every section light enough to load fast on launch day.
The result: 94/100 on performance, 1.8s load time, and launch week took them from 4,000 to 12,000 students.
What I keep relearning: on launch week, the page doesn't need to be clever. It needs to load before people lose interest.
That performance jump is impressive, especially with only six working days. A fast-loading site can make a real difference when a launch brings in thousands of visitors.