[berkle4455]

> And how many instances would be required if Go/Rust would have been used?

Zero. Because Shopify would have waited until Rust came out in 2015, instead of launching in 2006, and they would never have gotten off the ground and been another failed techbro startup that instead of getting shit done, bikeshedded over languages.

PHP and Ruby apps have generated far more revenues than all the Rust and Golang code combined.

[nindalf]

Rails was a great choice for Shopify, GitHub and Stripe, no doubt. No one is questioning that.

GP’s sarcastic “rails doesn’t scale” implies that it would also be a great choice for people starting afresh in 2023. The reply asks for a comparison with other languages popular in 2023, especially ones that are known for being more performant (lower memory and CPU consumption, lower latency).

And that’s when you’re dragging the conversation back to 2006. It’s not 2006 anymore.

[stevebmark]

Rails was initially too slow for Github, so they forked it, didn't use "Rails" for a while [1], lost literal engineering years to upgrading it (same for Shopify), and now Github has an engineering department dedicated to working of the Rails master branch directly, which is huge engineering overhead and a problem and solution that shouldn't exist. Github co-founder Tom lamented using Rails at Github and has stopped using it [2].

If you're Github or Shopify and can throw (waste?) engineering years at solving a framework specific ecosystem nightmare problems, and have the klout and runway to hire core Ruby and Rails maintainers, then you're probably in a highly unique situation and could use any framework you want.

The rest of us don't see Rails as a great choice for Github. Doubt and questioning.

[1] https://videos.itrevolution.com/watch/550704376/ [2] https://youtu.be/GfhPeOiXDLA?t=725

[byroot]

> Rails was initially too slow for GitHub, so they forked it, didn't use "Rails" for a while

That's a weird way of framing it.

They stuck with a fork of Rails 2.3 for a long time because the upgrade was deemed too costly, not because their fork was faster.

In the end their performance patches were either outdated or contributed upstream, and they are now on Rails main branch.

And while it was a fork, it was still largely "Rails".

[stevebmark]

Please listen to the Github engineers in the provided links.

> We forked rails and _practically wrote our own._ We fought against the framework. We deviated from the framework, and we even wondered if rails was right for us at all.

and

> Rails 3 was found to be five times slower than Rails 2

[byroot]

> Please listen to the GitHub engineers

I regularly talk with engineers that worked on that project at GitHub, some are now my coworkers. I know more about this effort than what was said publicly.

> Rails 3 was found to be five times slower than Rails 2

This is a bogus claim. It might have been 5 times slower on some pathological cases, it absolutely wasn't 5 times slower overall.

[stevebmark]

The presentation and "bogus claim" is from a principle Github engineer and core Rails team member. I will trust them rather than anonymous anecdotes.

[nindalf]

Yes, not ideal. But we can’t know what would have happened if they had chosen a different language in 2007. Did they have the option of an efficient, well supported language that continues to be used in 2023? Maybe Java, although Java languished for years before development picked up again. C# is also a candidate.

But one thing we can’t measure - how many candidates chose to join Shopify and GitHub because they were keen to work on Ruby? Java had a reputation for being boring, while Ruby was fun and exciting. Their success was possibly tied to this, but we’ll never know for sure.

In 2023 the calculus of what language to choose is different. But these companies are just glad they succeeded while others didn’t.

[gloryjulio]

The problem is at the time if you want things done fast, Rails was the right choice. Almost no startup would touch Spring as app server at the time. Django had not reached 1.0 yet, and it's not faster anyway. So for a startup, Rails was the only realistic choices.

[reducesuffering]

What I find ironic was that in 2006, Rails was the shiny new kid on the block. These co's picked the "new" way of doing web dev compared to the stodgy Java/C# types. And yet, by recommending Rails for a new startup in 2023, they're actually more like the stodgy Java/C# old school paradigm camp, that the Rails startups avoided! A startup that would've used Rails in 2006 is more like a startup that is using things like NextJS in 2023. We see that in the stacks of new YC companies

[ericb]

The NextJS folks and Go folks are in that sweet spot. You use the framework du jour, you pat each other on the back, beaming with the folly of your ancestors to use such inferior tools, thinking "this is a golden age of NextJS (or Go) that will surely never end."

What comes next might not even be better, but that won't matter, because what came before won't be cool anymore.

You die a hero or live long enough to become the villain.

[gloryjulio]

Nextjs is not comparable. I'm not sure if it's required to get some web pages out, I don't think frontend is that important in the startup space any way if u are able to fulfill the requirments

For app server nowadays u have many choices. But 15 years rails was really the only better choice for a few men's startup shops. C# was on windows shop, that's a no for many

[chucke]

You're implying that those languages made actual building products easier. I think we know by now they didn't. Go is a language which preaches building your boilerplate than reusing it. Produces very little of the economies of scale requires to build compelling products. It has other advantages, and the single binary thing captured a niche in infrastructure software, but that's it outside of Google. Rust is still young, jury is out, but it's already considered a big and hard to learn language, and that's not going to change soon. It'll eventually find a niche.

Ruby is still a great way to start it up. Consider that in 2006-2008, it's deployment story was horrible. Since then, the ruby ecosystem bootstrapped lockfiles, 12 factor app manifesto, and a lot of the conventions we all take for granted nowadays. And while there are certainly enough arguments to bikeshed on, its still a rock solid ecosystem.

[netheril96]

> Because Shopify would have waited until Rust came out in 2015, instead of launching in 2006,

> PHP and Ruby apps have generated far more revenues than all the Rust and Golang code combined.

You already stated the obvious: PHP and Ruby apps generated far more revenues simply by existing longer.

[phamilton]

I also question the revenue claim.

Google has a lot of revenue. Pinterest, Hashicorp, Uber, Twitch, Dropbox, etc. all have a good amount of golang and collectively have a lot of revenue. It might need a few more years to tip the scale, but it's closer than suggested here.

[nik736]

Twitch was initially built with Ruby on Rails as well.

[rafark]

YouTube was initially built with php, so the revenue argument is true.

[netheril96]

Was it? What I was told was that Youtube was built in Python and was gradually migrated to C++ after bought by Google.

[fiedzia]

and Dropbox with Python

[pjmlp]

Or they could have used something available in 2006, like C++, Java, .NET/C#, OCaml, Haskell, D.

[KronisLV]

> Or they could have used something available in 2006, like C++, Java, .NET/C#, OCaml, Haskell, D.

Going for .NET/C# would have likely limited anyone to using mostly Windows Server for their infrastructure. Not that it's a bad OS, but .NET Core was released only in 2016 and although Mono came out in 2004, sadly it never got the love it deserved and was rather unreliable (otherwise we would have seen way more cross platform development before .NET Core). Oh, also, turns out that LINQ (which is pretty cool) was only released in 2007, though that still puts them a bit ahead of Java I guess, although I can't comment on when it landed in Mono.

Going with Java would have meant using something like Java 6, whereas the first truly decent version (in my eyes) was Java 8, which came out in 2014. Of course, the older language version and runtime wouldn't be a huge issue, however projects like Spring Boot only came out in 2014 and before then most people would either use Spring, Java EE (now Jakarta EE) or a similar framework from back then. I've worked with both and it wasn't pleasant - essentially the XML configuration hell with layers of indirection that people lament.

I mean, either would have probably been doable, but it's not like other stacks are without fault (even the ones I cannot really comment on).

[pjmlp]

Stackoverflow is doing just fine with Windows Server.

Java 6 would still blow the water out of Ruby's slow interpreter.

Being pleasant isn't relevant for performance.

[KronisLV]

> Stackoverflow is doing just fine with Windows Server.

Good for them! I guess it mostly depends on what you want to build your platform around, what the constraints are and what developer skillsets are popular in your market.

> Java 6 would still blow the water out of Ruby's slow interpreter.

Probably! I do recall major GC improvements starting from JDK 8 onwards, though when compared to Ruby even the older versions would probably be decent: https://blogs.oracle.com/javamagazine/post/java-garbage-coll...

It would actually be fun if someone pulled out the old versions from back then and did some benchmarks, though maybe asking someone to build a full stack application in such a dated tech would be a tough ask, unless they're passionate about it!

> Being pleasant isn't relevant for performance.

If the discussion is just about performance, then that's true.

If we look at things realistically, then there's more to it - like using a tech stack that allows you to iterate reasonably quickly, as opposed to making your developers want to quit their jobs every time they have to debug some obscure Servlet related bug or to work with brittle configuration in XML (been there dozens of times), to the point where not as much could even get built in a given amount of time with a particular stack due to its challenges.

I do hate when people say that additional nodes are way cheaper than developer salaries, but they're also correct most of the time. Of course, there's also the humanitarian take to just not forget about the developer experience, otherwise we'd have written all of our web software in C++ even back then. It'd work really fast, but we'd have way less software in general.

[pjmlp]

Yet, Ruby hasn't necessarly taken over the enterprise, beyond those stuck with Rails apps.

[TheRealDunkirk]

It's amazing to me that so many people make "stuck with Rails" arguments in the enterprise. It's extraordinarily clear to me, having worked in 3 Fortune 250's, that the single, most-attractive-to-management feature of alternative stacks like Java and Javascript is... dun dun dun!... MASSIVE project bloat! Justifying huge teams and years of development time, leading to huge budgets and personal power within the company.

As a single, full-stack guy, I've out-coded entire teams of Java programmers TWICE using Rails. And none of the projects inside even-a-Fortune-size company come anywhere near concerns about "scaling" like we're discussing here.

So my takeaway after decades of doing full-stack development (also with PHP and .NET) is that Rails absolutely murders every other stack for time-to-market or MVP or whatever time-based metric you want to us, and has no effective liability in performance. The only places were are even discussing this kind of scalability is on some of the highest-trafficked web sites in the world, and even then I'd bet real money that the team size and time to develop features are still killing it over other stacks that would "scale" better.

[moonchrome]

C# in 2006 was a joke, probably worse than Rails in performance. This was the webforms era and old EF - meant for enterprise customers with a couple of hundred active users max... ASP.NET being a competitive/performant framework is a very recent development (since core basically which became usable past 2.0)

Haskell, OCaml and D are niche languages, probably aren't mature enough now to use for a production system that needs to scale (in terms of org growth and building complex systems).

Java web frameworks were also terrible in 2006 (this is the Java era that gave Java it's reputation) and the only thing worse for productivity I can think of is C++ hahaha ...

[pjmlp]

A joke is this comment.

All of them were faster and used less resources than a very slow interpreted language, by having JIT and AOT compilers, state of the art GC and great IDE offerings, even the niche ones had better tooling (Leksah and Merlin, versus nothing).

[p8]

Nobody cares about performance if you build a business application with a couple of users, a common use-case in 2005. The reason a lot of Java people jumped on the Rails bandwagon, was that an application that would take a month to build in Java with Spring/Hibernate, would take a day in Rails. See also: https://www.oreilly.com/library/view/beyond-java/0596100949/

[pjmlp]

Some Java people did, there is a reason why Ruby is hardly used outside Rails, while Java rules most of the backend workloads, a mobile OS, and plenty of embedded workloads.

[p8]

There's also a reason Kotlin has become the language of choice for the Android development industry, Scala became a thing, and ThoughtWorks recommended against using JavaServerFaces.

[moonchrome]

No they weren't - ASP.NET webforms and old EF was such a pile of shit it didn't matter how fast C# was (and back then it really wasn't, granted order of magnitude better than ruby/python, but way behind JVM). The applications built with it were dog slow and buggy - they couldn't even scale in enterprise setting.

Haskell, OCaml, D with great IDE support in 2006 ? Do they have that even today ?

I mean you're suggesting people use C++ for writing web apps (and c++98/03 no less !) - that's got to be facetious.

The real contender back then was PHP and Java, RoR really addressed a lot of issues from both. They both adopted the improvements brought by it since, but it took years.

[pjmlp]

Stackoverflow and plenty of Microsoft shops are enterprise enough.

> Haskell, OCaml, D with great IDE support in 2006 ? Do they have that even today ?

I mentioned Lekshat and Merlin for a reason, way better than Ruby with TextMate and Sublime.

Yes plenty of people were using C++ for Web applications in 2000 - 2006, via Apache, ngix and IIS plugins. Microsoft had ATLServer, Borland/Embarcadero still ship their webserver to this day.

I can assert that plenty of Nokia Networks WebUIs, were powered by C++/CORBA and Perl back in 2006. Transition to Java started in 2005.

As did several CRM systems, like the original Altitude Software application server.

RoR is for people that don't care about performance to start with.

[rapsey]

That was then and this is now. If you are building under endless VC money go ahead burn it. Most of us however do not have endless stacks of money to burn runing our code.

[cyclotron3k]

If you think time-to-market, and overall cost are going to be improved by building your vanilla website in Rust or Go, vs Rails, then I think you may be surprised

[BytesAndGears]

Yeah it’s nearly the main benefit of Ruby/Rails that you can spin up an mvp of your company in like a week, and have a decent feature set within a couple months.

The trap is when you start growing and it is hard to change. Because the features that took 1-2 months in RoR might take 3-4 months (or more!) to port to another language, and do you really want to stop your working business when it isn’t a problem?

Because Rails performs totally fine at small-mid startup scale. It’s only when you start getting a couple years old with lots of users that it starts to bite you. But at that point you already have gotten further than 90% of startups ever even make it. And at that point, honestly there are solutions for that too, like gradually pulling the poor-performing bits out into faster languages.

Writing this as someone who works for a startup that uses RoR, and I’ve seen it blow up over several years. I curse RoR daily because it pisses me off, but I don’t think this company would’ve gotten this far if it didn’t have the RoR speed at the beginning.

So are you better off starting your company on Go/Rust/Java? Maybe. But if getting to market fast will help you win, it’s hard to beat RoR.

[rapsey]

It is not 2006 anymore. Rails was a trailblazer. The productivity difference is not as large as it was compared to alternatives.

[tumdum_]

There are not comparably productive alternatives for rust right now :(

[brianwawok]

Rust isn’t really a real language for web development though. Just in the bubble here.

[berkle4455]

> Most of us however do not have endless stacks of money to burn runing our code.

This is such an absurd take. Do you really think startups lose runway because of the runtime performance of their code, and not failing to achieve PMF, overhiring, or spending too much on stupid techbro bullshit?