Google Engineering: Why does Google prefer the Java stack for its products instead of

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[h=1]Google Engineering: Why does Google prefer the Java stack for its products instead of Python?[/h]

Robert Love, Google Software Engineer and Manager on Web Search.

Man, I cannot imagine writing let alone maintaining a large software stack in Python. We use C++, Go, and Java for production software systems, with Python employed for scripting, testing, and tooling.

There are a bunch of reasons for the primacy of C++ and Java:

• Familiarity. Early Googlers were well-versed in C++.
  
• Performance. Java can be faster than Python; C++ can be faster than Java.
  
• Tooling. Tools for debugging, profiling, and so on are significantly better for Java than Python. Even C++ is easier to debug and understand in large systems.
  
• Concurrency. As you can imagine, Google systems are highly parallelized and many are highly threaded. Threading in Python is an unmitigated disaster. The global interpreter lock (GIL) is a giant pain in the ass.
  
• Lack of need for the prototyping prowess of Python. One commonly-cited strength of Python is that it is easier to rapidly prototype small systems in Python than Java and (to an even greater extent) C++. At Google, however, this benefit isn't all that appealing: We have a lot of powerful frameworks that make prototyping or extending existing systems easy. Folks tend to prototype by gluing a hack into an existing server rather than build an entirely new distributed system.
  

Don't get me wrong, in the war of Perl versus Python, I come down on the side of Python. But I would never use it to build a production, scalable, mission critical, performant system—particularly one someone else may need to understand some day long in the future.

Sursa: Robert Love's answer to Google Engineering: Why does Google prefer the Java stack for its products instead of Python? - Quora