Hacker News new | ask | show | jobs
by rjzzleep 4968 days ago
it's funny that this is even an issue anymore. at the time where twitter was started, the ruby vm has huge issues, and you couldn't even do evented io.

what I find even funnier is that people just throw in play and grails without a little of experience in rails. The eco system is entirely different:

- you can use java and therefore java libraries(yes you could do the same in jruby, but nvm) - bundles/gems are an order of magnitude better than classical java dependency hell. - need something in rails? add a gem. need something in grails? search throw the outdated plugins, search for missing documentation(just take a look at stackoverflow). in general -> write it yourself or pay a consultant to do it. - have a question? fight with incomplete documentation.

on top of that grails is just a stack on top of the spring mvc.

what about play? i like play more than I like grails tbh, because it doesn't want to be the rails of java. yes people compare it to one another, but that's just the familiarity effect.

now, where's the computationally intensive stuff? nowhere to be found. it's a web api. where's the computationally intensive stuff in twitter? I don't know, but chances are theres a native extension for that nowadays.

There actually was a time when you simply could not build a scalable system in ruby without too many hoops, but that's no longer the case. Yes the GIL is bad, but keep in mind that things like ruby fibers didn't even exist at the time.

1 comments

> i like play more than I like grails tbh, because it doesn't want to be the rails of java. yes people compare it to one another, but that's just the familiarity effect.

My memory might be playing tricks on me, but I remember play developers talking about rails being a huge influence.

If Play isn't rails for Java, how else one does a Rails for Java? The "familiarity effect" is there because Play is modeled after Rails.

> now, where's the computationally intensive stuff? nowhere to be found. it's a web api. where's the computationally intensive stuff in twitter? I don't know, but chances are theres a native extension for that nowadays.

Search, for one is computationally intensive. I am pretty sure there are more which the outside world doesn't know about.

> There actually was a time when you simply could not build a scalable system in ruby without too many hoops,

What scale are we talking about? At Twitter scale, ruby or anything else has to jump hoops. For example, network load from users coming online and offline on FB chat will break out of box solutions.