“My formative memory of Python was when the Quake Live team used it for the back end work, and we wound up having serious performance problems with a few million users. My bias is that a lot (not all!) of complex “scalable” systems can be done with a simple, single C++ server.”

https://x.com/ID_AA_Carmack/status/1210997702152069120

Games like quake are transient and have a small number of users sharing data and if it fails it doesn’t matter enough to need failover, although that could be done relatively easily with a write-ahead log. You need session stickyness at the load balancing layer but otherwise latency is more important than scale, so you don’t need a distributed system per se. Writing a small C/C++ server would make a lot of sense if you didn’t have Go, Rust, etc.