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Show HN: Compile Ruby to C

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Re: Show HN: Compile Ruby to C

#91

Post by untog »

fareesh wrote: post #87
nickjj wrote: post #85

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> The obvious performance and bloat overhead with RoR aside. Does the bloat matter in the end tho? You can build a million dollar business on a single $20 / month DigitalOcean server to run everything with tens of thousands of users. That's what Chris did from https://gorails.com . We talked about his Rails driven tech stack on the Running in Production podcast[0]. Recently he tweeted out he generated a million dolla…

I guess it depends on what you build. At the scale of GitHub and Twitter or Shopify there are probably significant challenges caused by said bloat.

But once you reach that level of scale you have (or should have!) the resources to redevelop services that are holding you back. Not choosing Rails because you intend some day to get to Twitter scale smells of premature optimisation. (Twitter themselves used Ruby!)

Re: Show HN: Compile Ruby to C

#92

Post by Lammy »

wukerplank wrote: post #49
pdimitar wrote: post #47

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This is what brought me to RoR land... and this is what made me leave. I agree rapid prototyping is an excellent point for RoR but when you need to actually evolve the project for years, it gets really tedious and hard. So for a dev shop RoR is quite fine -- you make the project, do very little iteration on it, and ship. That works well and I've experienced it. For longer-lived projects however, Phoenix is miles ahea…

What makes you say it is hard to maintain longer lived projects? (I used to be a RoR developer for a few years, so I'm curious about other people's experiences.)

I think there are probably a large number of people who "learn Rails" without really learning the deeper/unique concepts of vanilla Ruby. For me at least it was like a decade in between first writing some Ruby and really feeling like I've started to understand the full scope of the language and syntax that's available to me, such that I'm only now able to start thinking about what cool actual-things I can build with these concepts.

Re: Show HN: Compile Ruby to C

#93

Post by untog »

codegladiator wrote: post #71
joelbluminator wrote: post #69

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The weird thing is we have to keep semi-apologising for choosing Rails. Why is that? For each his own. I love Rails, sue me.

I am all for your love of Rails, but tools should not be picked based on how much you love them. Choose the correct tool for the job, if it is rails, good for you.

Depends why you love Ruby. If you love it because you adore programming languages with red logos then yes, bad choice. But if you love it because it lets you work quickly and performs well then that is a reason to pick it.

Not to mention, if you’re a solo developer or a small team, picking a language everyone knows and likes absolutely is a good reason. It’ll save you a lot of time.

Re: Show HN: Compile Ruby to C

#95

Post by Lammy »

unixhero wrote: post #42
bfieidhbrjr wrote: post #9

I'm sad Ruby has been, or is, left behind by python. There are lots of little reasons but no real big one. I just love ruby. I love little things like 'unless'. I know it's still with us, but still feels a little sad.

I also love Ruby, it's all the little things. It helps me along and makes me happy every time I manage find a solution to a problem. "Woah! Can I really do it just like this?!?!"

This feeling is one of the only things I've found to help keep hobby programming fun while also working full-time as a programmer. I am happy to let everyone at $work favor us writing Python for this reason :)

Re: Show HN: Compile Ruby to C

#96

Post by JeremyNT »

pdimitar wrote: post #47
fareesh wrote: post #44

The obvious performance and bloat overhead with RoR aside, I have yet to see a framework and ecosystem that lets you have a programmable web application up and running with typical features in comparable time. For shipping new products or testing out ideas, I have not come across a more optimal framework in terms of going from idea to market. Most often I've tried Phoenix, Django and Laravel as alternatives, but all…

This is what brought me to RoR land... and this is what made me leave. I agree rapid prototyping is an excellent point for RoR but when you need to actually evolve the project for years, it gets really tedious and hard. So for a dev shop RoR is quite fine -- you make the project, do very little iteration on it, and ship. That works well and I've experienced it. For longer-lived projects however, Phoenix is miles ahea…

> For longer-lived projects however, Phoenix is miles ahead. Even Rust's Rocket, but only if you are willing to invent a lot of stuff yourself (auth for example).

I can't speak to Phoenix, but I've looked into Rocket and don't understand how it can really be compared to Rails. There's so much you need to implement yourself that you'll end up spending a big chunk of time on implementing things that Rails (or high quality / well used gems in the Rails ecosystem) can provide for free. And don't get me wrong, I'd love to sit down and do that work, but my job is to make stuff work and make it work quickly, and my employer doesn't hire enough people that we can afford to dedicate that kind of time when it's already "solved" by a framework.

I tend to work on projects where the requirements change constantly, and they're never really "done." Saying rails is good for "prototyping" is not wrong, but in a world where software is always evolving, the features and capabilities that make Rails great for prototyping are also great for just day-to-day existence.

Re: Show HN: Compile Ruby to C

#97

Post by nobleach »

iamsb wrote: post #56
fareesh wrote: post #44

The obvious performance and bloat overhead with RoR aside, I have yet to see a framework and ecosystem that lets you have a programmable web application up and running with typical features in comparable time. For shipping new products or testing out ideas, I have not come across a more optimal framework in terms of going from idea to market. Most often I've tried Phoenix, Django and Laravel as alternatives, but all…

Spring Boot Kotlin is worth giving a go. It has rapid prototyping abilities, but underlying Java promise of easy refactoring, great tooling. I recently refactored entire frontend and parts of backend code without ever having to restart server.

While I wouldn't exactly put it in the Rails category, I love Spring Boot far more. I love Micronaut even MORE than Spring Boot... but that's another story.

Spring Boot doesn't tick ALL the Rails boxes (Scaffolding a backend CRUD admin interface, all of the complex templating stuff - although Thymeleaf is pretty darn good) I'd put my money on it being more maintainable a year later. Spring as an ecosystem is huge, so there's always a strong possibility someone else has already solved the problem you're trying to solve. The tooling is pretty fantastic as well. Kotlin as a language is just fantastic.

Re: Show HN: Compile Ruby to C

#98

Post by abhiyerra »

fareesh wrote: post #87
nickjj wrote: post #85

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> The obvious performance and bloat overhead with RoR aside. Does the bloat matter in the end tho? You can build a million dollar business on a single $20 / month DigitalOcean server to run everything with tens of thousands of users. That's what Chris did from https://gorails.com . We talked about his Rails driven tech stack on the Running in Production podcast[0]. Recently he tweeted out he generated a million dolla…

I guess it depends on what you build. At the scale of GitHub and Twitter or Shopify there are probably significant challenges caused by said bloat.

I have had to help scale a large scale Rails app and break it apart about 5 years ago. 500k requests per minute. That was tough. A lot of the features that Shopify and Github have upstreamed since then would have helped a lot and to be honest it is a lot easier to scale now with Rails because of those upstreamed features. Like multiple databases, viewcomponents, etc.

Re: Show HN: Compile Ruby to C

#99

Post by abhiyerra »

hasa wrote: post #51

The amount of new languages and "the absolute best framework" makes me think that big enterprises should never leave Java. Fancy project written on a newest tech is legacy before it is published. Scary from the business point of view. Disclaimer: I love Ruby.

Or use JRuby. :)

Re: Show HN: Compile Ruby to C

#100

Post by regularfry »

codegladiator wrote: post #76
joelbluminator wrote: post #73

Earlier quoted context omitted.

For me its Rails, also because I love it. None of us is 100% objective or rational about this. I'm very much aware most companies can be built with any of the common stacks, the tech barely matters for 90% of these companies. Why does it mater if advertisement algo company X or insurance tech company Y choose java/.net/ruby/php ? All these stacks are good enough and have been used countless times in varying scales.

For example if you are building something around nlp, probably pick python. Also, since you are all into ruby, maybe take a look around as to why other languages exist.

There's a solid question as to why the tool you'd pick for CRUD databasey stuff should be coupled to what you'd pick for NLP heavy lifting by the interpreter. Different jobs, different tools.
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