> If you want speed
> If you want to be efficient
Funny that you assume the best position of the trade off continuum isn't somewhere in the middle for most people. Besides, for developer efficiency, I prefer a language where I don't have to constantly worry if the type system is defeated at runtime.
The best position in the middle is the combination of Python and C. I don't know why people are so aghast about writing small C programs, compiling them, and launching them with Python through an os call.
>I prefer a language where I don't have to constantly worry if the type system is defeated at runtime.
If you are doing this with Python, you are doing something very wrong, even without mypy. As for NodeJS, just use Typescript.
> The best position in the middle is the combination of Python and C.
This is an opinion of which many would disagree, for various legitimate reasons, yet appears to be the polyglot approach you prefer. So let's briefly explore it.
> I don't know why people are so aghast about writing small C programs, compiling them, and launching them with Python through an os call.
There are significant limitations to using fork[0]/exec[1] as a general purpose component integration strategy, not the least of which is the inability of fine-grained bidirectional interactions.
A better "Python and C" integration option is to employ SWIG[2] to incorporate C/C++ libraries directly into the Python execution environment.
0 - https://man.freebsd.org/cgi/man.cgi?query=fork&apropos=0&sek...
1 - https://man.freebsd.org/cgi/man.cgi?query=execve&sektion=2&a...
2 - https://swig.org/
You don't fork/exec everytime. You fork/exec once, and then use a standard C template for a select or epoll loop for a unix socket, and transport all the data that you need processed fast using that, with bidirectional comms.
Even more so, you can often time prototype in Python with rapid dev, and then when you want performance, you can translate it to pretty much whatever, including C, using LLMs that do a pretty good job. With coding agents, you can set them up to basically run the code side by side against a bunch of inputs and automatically fix stuff. We pretty much did this at our job to translate an internal API backend to a web server written purely in C, that was fully memory safe without any memory bugs.