8 ms·

> 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 lau

> 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.

rapsey 3y ago
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 3y ago
  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 3y ago
    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 3y ago
      It is not 2006 anymore. Rails was a trailblazer. The productivity difference is not as large as it was compared to alternatives.
      - tumdum_ 3y ago
        There are not comparably productive alternatives for rust right now :(
        brianwawok 3y ago
        Rust isn’t really a real language for web development though. Just in the bubble here.
- berkle4455 3y ago
  > 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?
netheril96 3y ago
> 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 3y ago
  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 3y ago
    Twitch was initially built with Ruby on Rails as well.
    - fiedzia 3y ago
      and Dropbox with Python
    - rafark 3y ago
      YouTube was initially built with php, so the revenue argument is true.
      - netheril96 3y ago
        Was it? What I was told was that Youtube was built in Python and was gradually migrated to C++ after bought by Google.
nindalf 3y ago
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 3y ago
  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/ https://videos.itrevolution.com/watch/550704376/ [2] https://youtu.be/GfhPeOiXDLA?t=725 https://youtu.be/GfhPeOiXDLA?t=725
  - nindalf 3y ago
    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.
pjmlp 3y ago
Or they could have used something available in 2006, like C++, Java, .NET/C#, OCaml, Haskell, D.
- moonchrome 3y ago
  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 3y ago
    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 3y ago
      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/ https://www.oreilly.com/library/view/beyond-java/0596100949/
      - pjmlp 3y ago
        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.

rapsey 3y ago

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 3y ago
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 3y ago
  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 3y ago
    It is not 2006 anymore. Rails was a trailblazer. The productivity difference is not as large as it was compared to alternatives.
    - tumdum_ 3y ago
      There are not comparably productive alternatives for rust right now :(
      - brianwawok 3y ago
        Rust isn’t really a real language for web development though. Just in the bubble here.
berkle4455 3y ago
> 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?

netheril96 3y ago

> 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 3y ago
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 3y ago
  Twitch was initially built with Ruby on Rails as well.
  - fiedzia 3y ago
    and Dropbox with Python
  - rafark 3y ago
    YouTube was initially built with php, so the revenue argument is true.
    - netheril96 3y ago
      Was it? What I was told was that Youtube was built in Python and was gradually migrated to C++ after bought by Google.

nindalf 3y ago

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 3y ago
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/ https://videos.itrevolution.com/watch/550704376/ [2] https://youtu.be/GfhPeOiXDLA?t=725 https://youtu.be/GfhPeOiXDLA?t=725
- nindalf 3y ago
  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.

pjmlp 3y ago

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

moonchrome 3y ago
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 3y ago
  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 3y ago
    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/ https://www.oreilly.com/library/view/beyond-java/0596100949/
    - pjmlp 3y ago
      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.