I’ve updated the topic to clarify that I meant to discuss serverless in the scope of cloud functions and the architectures which are born out of that.
Cold start is indeed an interesting topic, @dimitarvp, but I think the discussion requires a bit more nuance than “faster cold start is better” and “native binaries start faster”.
You might for example be surprised to hear, that NodeJS seems to have better cold start characteristics than go - and that on all major cloud providers (AWS, GCP, Azure). In general the cold start characteristics of NodeJS rank among the fastest in languages commonly used in cloud functions.
And as mentioned before, faster cold start isn’t necessarily better. If your cloud function is consuming messages from a queue to send out emails, or write into a DB or an S3 bucket, or call a remote API, then cold start characteristics become pretty much irrelevant. Of course, when you actually want to run your API through the usage of cloud functions, then yes, cold start becomes important.
I’m not trying to say “use JS for all the things!” - I’m not that fond of JS myself. Instead I think that serverless - and cloud functions - is an interesting new pattern where seemingly important topics (startup times etc.) suddenly become a lot less important, depending on how you design your application.
If you ask me, I think the serverless paradigm has a bright future wherever you might want to “glue” out-of-band things together or where you have to handle ludicrous traffic spikes. A great example is Square Enix which used AWS Lambda to offload image processing for screenshots taken in Dragon Quest X, which experiences 20-30 times the usual traffic a few times per year.
TL;DR or in a nutshell I think that cloud functions, and by extension serverless, can allow us to build applications, or parts of a larger application, with characteristics usually reserved to much more complex deployments.
Will it replace “old” deployment strategies? Hell no! But will it become an interesting new tool in the deployment toolbox? I think yes.