We build and maintain a lot of Rails applications, with several of them almost a decade old. We have to keep them up to date, but Rails is stable and mature and this process is fairly easy. We come across a lot of web apps written in other ecosystems, using frameworks that were popular just a few years ago and have now been mostly abandoned. Or we get bit by an app that is a few years old and now has dependencies that are completely dead and core to the application. This isn’t the case with Rails. It is just as actively developed now as it was 10 years ago, and we are confident that it’ll be just as actively developed 10 years from now. Due to the fragmentation of these other ecosystems, even though the community as a whole may be larger, finding a stack that you can depend on for a long time can be a huge challenge.
Ask HN: Is Ruby on Rails still relevant?
101–110 of 160 posts
Re: Ask HN: Is Ruby on Rails still relevant?
#102For people in this thread comparing _Rails_ with _Go_ can you please help me understand something about Go: Is it a language that also has in std/core library web framework like support? Like PHP? I ask as I dont understand why people say drop Rails and learn Go. And I am looking to learn a new language along with Ruby and Elixir. Why is Go compared with Rails and not with Ruby? If Go does not include a default suppo…
you can go quite far with golang without needing any other library/framework with just std library which means less dependencies and lesser things to worry about in case of maintaining your code base, upgrading it with newere go version and ease of operation(since it is single executable). Some of the basic things that you need that don't require frameworks are 1. http/https 2. authentication 3. sending mails 4. temp…
Upgrading Rails itself has been relatively simple for at least the last few versions. Between Rails 2 and Rails 4 upgrades were very painful, but that's settled down significantly. You won't necessarily get the new features available with new versions, but especially recently things tend to stay fairly backwards compatible, and when functionality is removed it's almost always moved to a separate library that can just be included with little fuss.
Rails is also a fairly complete package, and you can get very far without additional libraries. Once you do start to bring in libraries it can get painful, particularly if you stray off the path of very popular libraries, but it's nowhere near the Javascript ecosystem.
You're right that Ruby itself won't get you far in terms of a webserver, but the vast majority of web development is done with Rails so in that context it's analogous to thinking of Rails as almost part of stdlib when thinking about web development specifically.
Re: Ask HN: Is Ruby on Rails still relevant?
#103Earlier quoted context omitted.
yeah, you'll see this argument a lot. If someone feels like re-implementing all the wonderful conveniences of rails in Go, more power to them. However, that's a MASSIVE amount of work that you'll be doing _instead_ of actually making the webapp. Go is great, but it's built in HTTP support isn't even _remotely_ equivalent to the many years of accreted utility in Rails. To put it another way, it's a false equivalence.…
This is fairly inaccurate. The stdlib accomplishes a lot and unless you absolutely must have a wizard in your CLI to generate routes then you really aren't missing much at all. Having designed products in both, I'd prefer Go these days because unless I'm making todo apps there is a lot of decision and freedom taken out of my hands by using rails. All of this disregards the speed advantage of go. There is no compariso…
Generators, while nice, are nowhere near the most important thing that Rails brings that are often overlooked, even by "full featured" frameworks in other ecosystems.
- Migrations are well-implemented, and I've definitely wasted many cycles at other startups dealing with hand-rolled migration tools that are nowhere near Rails.
- The ORM (ActiveRecord), while very opinionated, is pretty full featured and suitable for 95% of use cases (and makes it fairly easy to drop out of it if needed)
- There's a host of security features that are taken care of you by Rails out of the box, including CSRF protection, session security and password hashing with a sane strategy and good algorithms (I'm sure there's others I'm missing)
- Websocket functionality comes out of the box with newer versions of Rails
- Asset handling, including minifying and digesting assets is included.
- Directory structure is set up for you (seems minor, but it's a huge productivity boost when joining a new team knowing where everything should be).
- A standard approach to background queueing, built in a way that it's extensible for different queue / worker backends (i.e. your jobs are cross-compatible with different background libraries and backend servers - I can come onto a Rails job that stores background jobs in Postgres, SQS, Redis, or anything else and how the jobs work is consistent).
Regarding speed, I'm certainly not going to argue that Ruby is faster than Go, but at least for the problems that I tend to work on, raw language execution performance is never really the bottleneck. It's cheap to throw money at, and 99% of the time when I look at poorly performing actions the culprit is the database or an external service.
Re: Ask HN: Is Ruby on Rails still relevant?
#104I wouldn't choose RoR as a new tech to pick up in 2022. Think of it like a more stylish PHP - lots of it out there, but mostly not in companies working on things that are compelling, and the market share is on the decline.
Github, Airbnb, Stripe, and Gitlab all use Ruby (on Rails) to a significant extend. Compelling things, if you ask me. Stripe is even developing Sorbet [0], a Ruby type checker. Not that those are reason enough to use it. But I wouldn't call it the wrong decision either. 0 - https://sorbet.org/
Shopify is another notable one.
Re: Ask HN: Is Ruby on Rails still relevant?
#105Ruby has been on the downswing for a while, getting squeezed from all sides from the meteoric rise of Python on one side, JS/Typescript on the other, to higher performing static languages on another: https://octoverse.github.com/#top-languages-over-the-years It also has a funky syntax, while not a big deal, doesn't do it any favors in a C --> Javascript world. Django, golang, etc. are free. I don't recommend starting…
This is the right answer. Yes people still write on rails but in my experience it’s because they haven’t used other tools. I had a couple die hard rails members at my last company who claimed nothing was better. We made them write Go for a year and now they are die hard Go fans. If I were writing a web app I would start with Go. It’s a great language that’s easy to learn and fast to write, with all the security of st…
I've never understood the Go / RoR comparisons. If someone goes from being a die-hard Rails fan to a die-hard Go fan, that feels very much like they're choosing their tools based on fashion / fandom vs. picking the right tool for the job.
Go and RoR couldn't be more dissimilar from each other. One is a relatively slow language with one of the most full-featured and robust frameworks available today, and one is a very fast language with relatively minimal tools for building web applications. The types of projects they're suitable for are completely different
Re: Ask HN: Is Ruby on Rails still relevant?
#106Earlier quoted context omitted.
Hmm, SSR is used quite often, it has just reached the boring stage. Also, rust is too BDSM for rapid CRUD building needs.
Obsolete is probably an overstatement but its in decline IMO. The last few companies I have worked at have moved away from SSR which seems to reflect a wider industry trend. I have worked mostly in enterprise web apps which client side rendering suits better which might have some bias.
If anything, I've seen the start of the reverse happening. The warts are starting to show on the pure SPA approach, and people are either finding ways to do more SSR with the SPA tools, or taking new approaches like LiveView in Phoenix or Hotwire in Rails to provide richer experiences while still generating HTML on the server.
The heyday of "SPA is the right approach for everything" feels like it peaked at least a few years ago.
Re: Ask HN: Is Ruby on Rails still relevant?
#107For people in this thread comparing _Rails_ with _Go_ can you please help me understand something about Go: Is it a language that also has in std/core library web framework like support? Like PHP? I ask as I dont understand why people say drop Rails and learn Go. And I am looking to learn a new language along with Ruby and Elixir. Why is Go compared with Rails and not with Ruby? If Go does not include a default suppo…
I don't think most are directly comparing them as it might seem on the surface. Simply pointing that, if ruby is past its prime, then rails is as well. We don't know what the end project is for everyone, so choosing a web framework here in the comments is kinda early in the discussion anyway.
There simply is no evidence whatsoever that Ruby is past its prime. People are committing myriad logical fallacies: comparing go language to rails framework, anecdotes about Ruby monoliths, incorrect statements of fact about Ruby capability and more.
I like Go, but this is a terrible comparison and I’ve not seen a single comment make a valid point about Ruby’s alleged demise.
Re: Ask HN: Is Ruby on Rails still relevant?
#108We're still starting new greenfield projects in Rails every week, and I still believe it's the best foundation for SaaS products. It's great for developer speed and efficiency, the ecosystem of gems is amazing, and we've been able to scale every project we've needed to. We're incorporating React and GraphQL more these days for complex components and APIs but they pair nicely with Rails.
I work at a company with a large Ruby monolith and it’s a disaster. If you’re face deep in the Ruby ecosystem then I’m sure it makes sense, but trying to build services alongside it is truly awful. You want a scalable system that’s easy to write and will grow with you? Write basic Go services.
> You want a scalable system that’s easy to write and will grow with you? Write basic Go service
What's so easy about Go? I don't get it. Honestly. What's so hard for you to do in Ruby? And who's to say that in 15 years those shiny Go services you're working on won't become shit after dozens of changing devs had their way with them? Turning a codebase into shit takes time.
Re: Ask HN: Is Ruby on Rails still relevant?
#109Earlier quoted context omitted.
I work at a company with a large Ruby monolith and it’s a disaster. If you’re face deep in the Ruby ecosystem then I’m sure it makes sense, but trying to build services alongside it is truly awful. You want a scalable system that’s easy to write and will grow with you? Write basic Go services.
I've been at a company that did this, they started migrating everything to Go because it was the new cool thing to do and everyone was in love with it. One year later it was a mess of network calls, no ORMs and nearly-raw queries because who needs an ORM, migrations run by SQL statements on bash scripts because who needs migrations. Validations were custom wrappers on some validation libraries and validation errors w…
This is so true.
Now there's ORM for Go (Gorm), and maybe a few web frameworks, but it just feels like any other beginning ecosystem - not much on Stackoverflow if you run into problems, docs aren't that good yet, incomplete APIs, missing functionality. And it has the same Node mindset of not having a major framework to tie everything together like Rails does- which I hate.
To go to your bosses and tell them you have to migrate from Ruby to Go to improve productivity is a blatant lie.
Re: Ask HN: Is Ruby on Rails still relevant?
#110For people in this thread comparing _Rails_ with _Go_ can you please help me understand something about Go: Is it a language that also has in std/core library web framework like support? Like PHP? I ask as I dont understand why people say drop Rails and learn Go. And I am looking to learn a new language along with Ruby and Elixir. Why is Go compared with Rails and not with Ruby? If Go does not include a default suppo…
> I ask as I dont understand why people say drop Rails and learn Go
Agreed. I don't think Go is that great for normal CRUD web development at all, maybe its interesting for super high concurrency / low level stuff.