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Lua: The 278K Language Running 20% of the Internet
How a 33-year-old scripting language from Brazil quietly powers Roblox, Cloudflare, and billions of requests daily.
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11 articles
How a 33-year-old scripting language from Brazil quietly powers Roblox, Cloudflare, and billions of requests daily.
Our LLM bill hit $23K/month. Three layers — prompt caching, semantic caching, and model routing — cut it to $8.6K. Here's how.
uv is 10-100x faster than pip and replaces 7 tools. ruff replaces 10 linting/formatting tools. Migration takes 5 minutes. Here's how.
A missing timeout killed our checkout on Black Friday. Rate limiting, circuit breakers, and backpressure are the three patterns that prevent cascading failures.
A 47-second Postgres query took 120ms on ClickHouse. Columnar storage, vectorized execution, and why your analytics belong in OLAP.
A single missing PostgreSQL index cost $40K/month. Partial indexes, covering indexes, BRIN — the indexing tricks most devs never learn.
Polars is 8.7x faster than pandas. DuckDB is 9.4x faster. Both handle larger-than-RAM data. Here's when to use each — with benchmarks.
Python 3.14's free-threaded build is officially supported. 10x speedups on CPU-bound tasks, 51% package compatibility, and Django runs without the GIL.
uv, ruff, Polars, Pydantic v2, orjson — all Rust under the hood. 13 Python tools rewritten in Rust, all 10-100x faster. The 95/5 pattern explained.
Playwright: 45% adoption, 78K GitHub stars, 2-3x faster than Selenium. Auto-wait killed flaky tests. Migration guide from Cypress and Selenium.
Wasm cold starts in 40 microseconds vs 100ms for containers. 20x density advantage. 95% cost reduction. Production at Amazon, Adobe, Cloudflare.