[cowsandmilk]

> The fact is that performance oriented organizations optimize everything unless they have math telling them it isn't worth optimizing.

Most companies don’t have unlimited budgets. Performance-oriented organizations profile and then spend money where profiling tells them to. Shopify isn’t hiring people to contribute to MySQL or Redis internals. They hired a full team to work on Ruby internals, not just creating YJIT, but also on CRuby’s memory layout, hiring the lead on TruffleRuby, and funding academic programming language research on Ruby.

No company has an infinite budget to “optimize everything”. It is clear where internal performance testing pointed Shopify (at Ruby) and with double digit gains being extracted year after year, their profiling didn’t lie. And other Ruby on Rails shops are seeing similar double digit performance wins, not on fake benchmarks, but on actual page load times and traffic that can be handled by a server.

[byroot]

Disclaimer: I'm a member of the Ruby & Rails infrastructure team at Shopify and Ruby committer.

> Shopify isn’t hiring people to contribute to MySQL or Redis internals

You are not wrong, but the main reason is that contrary to Ruby, MySQL and Redis are used by a lot of huge companies and are themselves owned by companies with full time people on it.

In comparison Ruby is still mostly a volunteer ran project that receive little funding and effort relative to its importance.

As for why trying to make Ruby faster at all in the first place. It's not because it was too slow, it's mostly just that at our scale, the engineering time spent on optimizing the runtime pretty much pays for itself.

But that's nothing specific to Ruby, in most very large software companies you will find similar efforts. e.g. I remember Twitter had a team working on the JVM, etc.

[Justsignedup]

thank you for that insight! If I had to guess, early on shopify had a choice to say jump to Java or a JVM-based language and scrap Ruby altogether, but they chose that the benefits of ruby outweigh the benefits of java's performance. So now given that shopify is large enough spending $1MM to win $5MM on infrastructure yearly is easily worth it.

In any case, I am very grateful to Shopify because I think if they decided to switch over to java back in the day, ruby may actually be a mostly dead language by now.

[byroot]

> had a choice to say jump to Java or a JVM-based language and scrap Ruby altogether

As someone who joined Shopify 10 years ago, my perception is that it wasn't an option.

At the time competition was fierce and the priority was to get new features to grow.

If you are a free service Twitter, with a strong network effect, it makes sense to retool to reduce your costs, as it's a primary factor in profitability.

If you are a B2B paying service like Shopify with little to no network effect to keep your leading position, halting features for years while you re-tool, re-train etc is a death sentence.

My (hot) take is that if Shopify had decided to switch over to Java back in the day, Shopify may actually be a mostly dead company by now.

[Justsignedup]

Thank you for that insight. I think that is really great to surface. If your product relies on the ability to spin up new features, then inefficiencies in operating costs can be eaten up by the fact that the company functions. If you don't spin up features that quickly but operational costs is king, then you make different decisions.

In any case, it has been a pleasure hearing insights from the inside. Thank you.

[CyberDildonics]

Most companies don’t have unlimited budgets. Performance-oriented organizations profile and then spend money where profiling tells them to.

The bizarre part here is that anyone who paint themselves into a corner with ruby, then decide that they need to implement an entire new fancy VM instead of just find targeted bottlenecks and rewriting them in C++. They writing complicated native programs to make a VM that is only 15% faster when they could rewrite specific sections that are slow and speed those up by 200x or more.