Well, the problem is that I never did any substantial web development in C++. Why? Because there are not that many convenient libraries/frameworks for C++. It's that simple. (I didn't use Wt, but at a glance it seems that it's rather small and not that many features). As opposed to that, Django comes with *so* many things out of the box, that you get a very considerable leg up from the start. Think about ORM including migrations, session management, caching, templates, security, forms, management script etc etc. There are also a lot of third party modules to provide additional functionality, almost anything you can think of! From ready made CMS, social authentication, forums etc.
Now, I very much feel you with regards to static typing/compilation, I most certainly love these things myself. But again, no large framework for C++, so I'd have to write all this stuff myself, and that is a lot of work. My main goal is a pragmatic one - to have a working product. That said, there are some alternatives to Django which are closer to what you might find more acceptable - something like Play Framework (Java/Scala) or ASP.NET core (C# or even F#). Unfortunately, you'd be surprised, how many more third party modules there are for Django than for both of those put together.
Regarding Python 4 - I think we are like 10 years away from it, given the experience of Python 3 :) And hopefully, there will be much easier transition than from 2 to 3.
As performance goes, I would say this shouldn't be a huge worry. If your site is a "regular" one, than things like SQL queries will be a much heavier burden on your requests than any difference between C++ and Python. So, caching and query optimisation will have much stronger impact on the performance. And if you do discover that Python is the bottleneck, then either check out cython, or even rewrite the critical session in C++ (quite easy with python).
To sum up, Python is not the best choice as a language from my personal point of view, but the feature rich framework and the niche around Django make it a good option when you need to do shit done quickly and with limited development resources.
June 22, 2020, 6:20 a.m. - andre
Well, the problem is that I never did any substantial web development in C++. Why? Because there are not that many convenient libraries/frameworks for C++. It's that simple. (I didn't use Wt, but at a glance it seems that it's rather small and not that many features). As opposed to that, Django comes with *so* many things out of the box, that you get a very considerable leg up from the start. Think about ORM including migrations, session management, caching, templates, security, forms, management script etc etc. There are also a lot of third party modules to provide additional functionality, almost anything you can think of! From ready made CMS, social authentication, forums etc. Now, I very much feel you with regards to static typing/compilation, I most certainly love these things myself. But again, no large framework for C++, so I'd have to write all this stuff myself, and that is a lot of work. My main goal is a pragmatic one - to have a working product. That said, there are some alternatives to Django which are closer to what you might find more acceptable - something like Play Framework (Java/Scala) or ASP.NET core (C# or even F#). Unfortunately, you'd be surprised, how many more third party modules there are for Django than for both of those put together. Regarding Python 4 - I think we are like 10 years away from it, given the experience of Python 3 :) And hopefully, there will be much easier transition than from 2 to 3. As performance goes, I would say this shouldn't be a huge worry. If your site is a "regular" one, than things like SQL queries will be a much heavier burden on your requests than any difference between C++ and Python. So, caching and query optimisation will have much stronger impact on the performance. And if you do discover that Python is the bottleneck, then either check out cython, or even rewrite the critical session in C++ (quite easy with python). To sum up, Python is not the best choice as a language from my personal point of view, but the feature rich framework and the niche around Django make it a good option when you need to do shit done quickly and with limited development resources.