[Mikeb85]

Rails doesn't scale? Github's the largest code repository site in the world. Stripe's one of the largest fintech sites in the world. Shopify is one of the largest ecommerce sites in the world. There's also Airbnb, TripAdvisor, many others that are huge.

Also, you can write shitty, slow code in any language. You can make too many calls to the DB in any language. You can also scale to Google size in any language.

Python isn't a quick language. Also most of the ML bits are C++ bits. Ruby is faster than Python for most things. But Google (and others) have done well with Python (and other bits). Facebook got huge with PHP (which no one truly likes).

Ruby is a fine language (also very pleasant to use), Rails powers many huge companies, sometimes nitpicks are just that.

[KronisLV]

> Rails doesn't scale? Github's the largest code repository site in the world.

You know, i think i understand both of the viewpoints here. Personally, i'd say that Rails doesn't scale as well as i'd expect it to. You can definitely build scalable systems in it, though you'll end up throwing a whole bunch of hardware resources, when compared to certain other languages and technology stacks, to serve similar load.

For example, right now i self-host a GitLab (https://about.gitlab.com/) instance for managing my code repositories, CI builds and so on. Even with just me using it (alongside some automated processes), it routinely eats up close to 4 GB of RAM, which in my case is an entire VPSes worth and costs me about 60 Euros a year with Time4VPS (affiliate link, if you'd like to check it out: https://www.time4vps.com/?affid=5294) but would cost me way more in AWS, GCP etc. One could argue that that's not too expensive, but not everyone earns a lot of money and running 10-20 VPSes does eventually add up, since i can't afford colocation and my residential homelab setup with a WireGuard tunnel to bypass ISP NAT with a proxy VPS is pretty slow, even if i can afford more storage, RAM and CPU power that way.

Compare that situation to projects like Gogs (https://gogs.io/), Gitea (https://gitea.com/), GitBucket (https://gitbucket.github.io/) and sourcehut (https://sourcehut.org/) - i'd argue that all of them on average use less CPU resources and memory for accomplishing similar tasks.

However, we cannot ignore the fact that using Ruby might have been exactly what allowed for quickly creating the functionality of GitLab and many other platforms and tools out there, GitHub included, so the choice between usable software and innovation in the near future and performant software possibly years from now is a tricky one.

There are probably good arguments for both, but noone can declare either to be better. Personally, i don't mind using Ruby, Python or even PHP when it makes sense and i don't need to worry about scalability from day 0.

[papaf]

it routinely eats up close to 4 GB of RAM, which in my case is an entire VPSes worth and costs me about 60 Euros a year

You are absolutely correct that running other peoples Ruby code is expensive. I would argue similarly for Java because of the high RAM requirements.

However, if you are a company developing your own software, if you use a more productive technology and it spares just 1 programmer then you have paid for a few hundred VMs and running costs become insignificant compared to labour costs.

This is an argument in favour for both Rails and the Java monsters.

[tyingq]

Github does make it work, but you can see there's a tradeoff for that. Like in this blog post:

https://github.blog/2020-08-25-upgrading-github-to-ruby-2-7/

You see mentions of 70 second application boot times. Also interesting is the reference that a future upgrade to Ruby 3.x might increase performance by a factor of 3. That would mean they are leaving quite a lot on the table right now.

Basically, yes, they make it scale, but that's not free.

[kevinmchugh]

Ruby 3 being 3x faster is based on a video game emulation benchmark. Rails sites won't see anything like that. The ruby team chose a really specific benchmark to target and it's frustrating that it's not communicated well, leading to understandable misunderstandings.

[tyingq]

Somewhat interesting then, that Github cites the 3x without that context.

[lambda_lord]

Stripe never used Rails. It uses Ruby with in-house ODM libraries, logging frameworks, and more. And a lot of those features are being moved to Java services.