[pdimitar]

Maybe start moving away from Ruby on Rails. Good web stacks in Golang and Rust do exist and at that scale they're likely the only sensible choices.

How far must the sunk cost fallacy go before something is done?

[speedgoose]

Which Golang or rust web stacks are as good as rails?

[pdimitar]

I'm not saying they are as good -- I'm saying that they are good.

Meaning that at one point extra programmer difficulty is worth it if your everyday web stack can't keep up.

[speedgoose]

Oh I see. It’s difficult to justify replacing rails, that has been successfully used for many years, by something not as good (worse?).

[pdimitar]

Rails is convenient and intuitive, I don't think anyone reasonable is arguing that.

My point is that if the stack regularly falls over then the programmer convenience has to be sacrificed in favor of stable and mega-fast alternative that requires more programmer energy.

I love working with dynamic languages. I can prototype almost anything that I want to do, in hours. But I also recognized the need for a hardcore stack for a previous contract and went the long and painful route with Rust.

Result: the project is running for 7 months now, has only been restarted 4 times for updating it (re-deployment), never crashed once, handles 5000+ network connections and streams data from them 24/7.

Peak CPU usage on a 4-core VPS: 27%.

Peak memory usage: 180MB. Normal average memory usage: 80MB.

Right tool for the job.

[eddsh1994]

Why do you assume the outages are language related and not due to the complex product having bugs? How does Rust prevent bad schema changes or missing data in the DB?

[pdimitar]

Because I worked with Rails for 6.5 years. Outages beyond smaller scales were at best a weekly occurrence.

Obviously I can't know for sure but it's not an uninformed assumption.

[darksaints]

Rails is a huge problem, but the most mature libraries/frameworks in Go/Rust are all micro-frameworks, which isn't much of a replacement. Maybe some .NET frameworks would be a better choice.

[pdimitar]

Well I mean if stability plus performance are the main requirements then I'd disqualify everything except Rust.

Though I'd personally do it in Elixir but again, speed. GitHub is huge and should rise up to the challenge.

[hit8run]

It’s quite the opposite: Rails is a big enabler.

[darksaints]

The only thing Rails enables is getting started quickly. Maintenance is a complete nightmare. I have no problem refactoring large Scala apps or F# apps or even Rust apps...but that one fucking Rails app I have in my portfolio is the absolute worst. Still stuck on rails 4 because the time I upgraded it to 4 took two whole weeks of my life away from me. Never again. I'd rather rewrite from scratch than do that again.

[pdimitar]

Only in the first project phases. After that the teams start fighting over which MV-ABCXYZ abstraction to use. :)

I've seen good and productive Rails teams but they had to deliberately stop themselves from certain practices, otherwise they ran into problems. Long topic though, and people get very emotional and preachy defending Rails so it's a fruitless discussion 99.9% of the time.

In the end use what you feel works best for you and your team. Objective differences in programmer productivity, machine speed, iteration speed and other metrics does exist though and it's very tiring to see people constantly pretend otherwise.

[hit8run]

Because you like Go or Rust better? Makes sense… muhahaha

[pdimitar]

I don't like either very much. But I've worked with them extensively and they are a better fit for when you want to squeeze more resources and more stability (the latter depends on certain details but it's certainly easier to achieve compared to Rails).