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FWIW: Tobi mentioned that if he had to do it all over again, he would still build the admin and business logic of Shopify in Ruby on Rails, but would probably b

FWIW: Tobi mentioned that if he had to do it all over again, he would still build the admin and business logic of Shopify in Ruby on Rails, but would probably build their liquid rendering in Rust or something like it https://twitter.com/tobi/status/1585459224506671104?s=20&t=0V3U4MDFfXKWUzMTIH-X-g https://twitter.com/tobi/status/1585459224506671104?s=20&t=0...

reducesuffering 4y ago
Probably only because that's what he's familiar with. Rails has the most ubiquitous scale problems that large co's keep migrating away from, and new devs are trending away from it. Shopify investing into the JS/TS backend world is just another domino falling of Ruby/Rails descending into Perl-like prevalence.
- weatherlite 4y ago
  They are spending tens of millions building a ruby JIT so I am not sure you are painting an accurate picture here...
  - reducesuffering 4y ago
    So they recognize they're having problems with speed. Dropbox also spent years trying to JIT Python faster with Pyston, and were unsuccessful. They now are leveraging Rust and Go instead.
    - skinnymuch 4y ago
      how do you keep up with developments like this? I suddenly see how interested I am in what stacks companies are using and more so what are they going to be using in the near to mid term future.
      - reducesuffering 4y ago
        For trends: StackOverflow Trends: https://insights.stackoverflow.com/trends?tags=ruby%2Ctypescript%2Cgo%2Crust https://insights.stackoverflow.com/trends?tags=ruby%2Ctypesc... GitHub Star History: https://star-history.com/ https://star-history.com/ NPM trends: https://npmtrends.com/ https://npmtrends.com/ For specific co tech stacks: Tech Co migrations: https://github.com/kokizzu/list-of-tech-migrations https://github.com/kokizzu/list-of-tech-migrations https://stackshare.io/wikipedia/wikipedia https://stackshare.io/wikipedia/wikipedia https://builtwith.com/ https://builtwith.com/ Company GitHub page And HN in general, like surfacing this Shopify acquisition.
      - ativzzz 4y ago
        I imagine following the tech blogs of certain companies - you can read about dropbox's engine rewrite here - https://dropbox.tech/infrastructure/rewriting-the-heart-of-our-sync-engine https://dropbox.tech/infrastructure/rewriting-the-heart-of-o...
    - weatherlite 4y ago
      What you just said doesn't change the fact you painted an inaccurate picture. Will Shopify ditch Ruby one day? Maybe...not likely imo but maybe. For now there's zero signs they're doing that. They're investing tens of millions of dollars in Ruby as I said ... I looked at their JIT team and these guys don't come in cheap. I have no idea what this Remix purchase means but I find it hard to believe it's about rewriting everything in JS. As for the JIT progress here are the stats https://speed.yjit.org/ https://speed.yjit.org/. I think they've been working on it for around 1.5 years they're definitely not done. Its not fantastic yet but almost 40% faster is nothing to sneeze at. If JS became fast why can't Ruby or Python? What you said about Dropbox is interesting, why is Dropbox the ones making the effort? They are not that big. There are huge companies running millions of lines of Python code - Instagram is a Django app and Google probably has a bunch of Python. I'd expect these companies to make the effort ...guess there's no economic incentive yet.
cultofmetatron 4y ago
elixir/phoenix gives you a lot of the same productivity as rails with vastly higher performance. the big benefit to rails these days is the massive ecosystem of drop in gems.
- cutler 4y ago
  Modulecounts.com shows Ruby gem output grinding to a halt. As Ruby's popularity declines a lot of gems will be unmaintained. It's a shame as I rate Ruby my favourite language after Clojure.

reducesuffering 4y ago

Probably only because that's what he's familiar with. Rails has the most ubiquitous scale problems that large co's keep migrating away from, and new devs are trending away from it. Shopify investing into the JS/TS backend world is just another domino falling of Ruby/Rails descending into Perl-like prevalence.

weatherlite 4y ago
They are spending tens of millions building a ruby JIT so I am not sure you are painting an accurate picture here...
- reducesuffering 4y ago
  So they recognize they're having problems with speed. Dropbox also spent years trying to JIT Python faster with Pyston, and were unsuccessful. They now are leveraging Rust and Go instead.
  - skinnymuch 4y ago
    how do you keep up with developments like this? I suddenly see how interested I am in what stacks companies are using and more so what are they going to be using in the near to mid term future.
    - reducesuffering 4y ago
      For trends: StackOverflow Trends: https://insights.stackoverflow.com/trends?tags=ruby%2Ctypescript%2Cgo%2Crust https://insights.stackoverflow.com/trends?tags=ruby%2Ctypesc... GitHub Star History: https://star-history.com/ https://star-history.com/ NPM trends: https://npmtrends.com/ https://npmtrends.com/ For specific co tech stacks: Tech Co migrations: https://github.com/kokizzu/list-of-tech-migrations https://github.com/kokizzu/list-of-tech-migrations https://stackshare.io/wikipedia/wikipedia https://stackshare.io/wikipedia/wikipedia https://builtwith.com/ https://builtwith.com/ Company GitHub page And HN in general, like surfacing this Shopify acquisition.
    - ativzzz 4y ago
      I imagine following the tech blogs of certain companies - you can read about dropbox's engine rewrite here - https://dropbox.tech/infrastructure/rewriting-the-heart-of-our-sync-engine https://dropbox.tech/infrastructure/rewriting-the-heart-of-o...
  - weatherlite 4y ago
    What you just said doesn't change the fact you painted an inaccurate picture. Will Shopify ditch Ruby one day? Maybe...not likely imo but maybe. For now there's zero signs they're doing that. They're investing tens of millions of dollars in Ruby as I said ... I looked at their JIT team and these guys don't come in cheap. I have no idea what this Remix purchase means but I find it hard to believe it's about rewriting everything in JS. As for the JIT progress here are the stats https://speed.yjit.org/ https://speed.yjit.org/. I think they've been working on it for around 1.5 years they're definitely not done. Its not fantastic yet but almost 40% faster is nothing to sneeze at. If JS became fast why can't Ruby or Python? What you said about Dropbox is interesting, why is Dropbox the ones making the effort? They are not that big. There are huge companies running millions of lines of Python code - Instagram is a Django app and Google probably has a bunch of Python. I'd expect these companies to make the effort ...guess there's no economic incentive yet.

cultofmetatron 4y ago

elixir/phoenix gives you a lot of the same productivity as rails with vastly higher performance. the big benefit to rails these days is the massive ecosystem of drop in gems.

cutler 4y ago
Modulecounts.com shows Ruby gem output grinding to a halt. As Ruby's popularity declines a lot of gems will be unmaintained. It's a shame as I rate Ruby my favourite language after Clojure.