Hacker News new | ask | show | jobs
by whstl 219 days ago
This attitude towards wastefulness is how you have web apps that could run in a single machine but struggle to run in a server cluster.

And after a couple years even Postgres is struggling because the amount of queries is too massive because of abstractions that don’t lend themselves to optimization.

Also it’s how you have codebases that could be maintained by two or three suddenly needing dozens because the testing suite needs hours to run and people even celebrate when there’s no tests in sight.

Just anecdotal personal experience. But I saw this happening inside at least 4 successful companies that started with Rails but didn’t care about those problems, and ended up wanting/having to move to something else.

2 comments

Again, though, these bottlenecks are because of how the system queries the database, not how methods are dispatched.

I agree on the ORM abstractions causing huge performance issues, but it has nothing to do with Ruby’s dynamic method declarations.

I'm not talking about method dispatch, I'm talking about the "usual response to this complaint in the Ruby/Rails community".
The reality is most companies and products never blow bast the point of needed to ditch Rails. The argument made at the time was scaling horizontally is cheaper than hiring new devs, and you probably will never need to scale that much horizontally.

Test suite bloat is a different problem that stems from the lack of incremental typing which I think is what ultimately killed Ruby and Rails.

Any big Rails codebase can be a nightmare to grok unless people have been diligent about documenting what different methods return.

Nothing has “killed Ruby on Rails”.

Ridiculous comment.

I'm honored to have you of all people make that comment.

But with all due respect the excitement and job market for Ruby isn't anything close to what it used to be:

[0]: https://trends.google.com/trends/explore?date=all&q=%2Fm%2F0...