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Moving on from Rails and What’s Next

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Re: Moving on from Rails and What’s Next

#31

Post by cbHXBY1D »

cocochanel wrote: post #10
freehunter wrote: post #2

I’ve seen a number of people move from Rails to Rust... is that really a common move? Seems like they’re very different and designed for very different things. Are people commonly building web applications in Rust? I know it’s possible but C++ has web frameworks too and that seems like a more apt comparison. I guess I’m just baffled by the number of people on here that I see pointing to Rust as the next project they…

Correct, they are for completely different purposes. I have the feeling that a lot of people (particularly the bloggers/more vocal types) jump into newer languages for no other reason than to position themselves as experts in said language/stack, right when it's getting more popular. I've seen this happen with Ruby/Rails, JavaScript/Node, and now Rust. In this case, it would have made a lot more sense to move to some…

I think this is one of the reasons the Rust community is so much more focused on web related technologies than other software. Web servers are where most of the community is coming from and how they make a living so it makes sense. TUIs are also popular but I would love to see more emphasis on getting cross platform GUIs working (as well as kernels, codecs, drivers, graphics, data science, etc).

Mmstick had a good post about this two months ago: https://www.reddit.com/r/rust/comments/af43dy/rust_windows_g...

Re: Moving on from Rails and What’s Next

#32

Post by dimaboychev »

grogenaut wrote: post #23
ajmurmann wrote: post #13

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Is this really an issue for most devs moving from Ruby? I don't think I have ever run Ruby on Windows or talked to anyone who did.

In 2008 when I did rails I was always annoyed that the dev tools heavily favored mac but you deployed to linux. No end of issues with native gems and deploys. I don't think I was using windows back then.

I hate this. Some tools work best on Linux (i.e. LAMP/LEMP, composer, etc. - performance is noticeably better than Mac). I don't even mention Windows here because it's probably worse. I'd love to have one ultimate OS to do web development, but find myself hopping to Linux and back to Mac... and occasionally to Windows (games :D). Mac/Windows with Linux VM solves this issue, but it's a hassle. Windows Subsystem for Linux is again very slow (try composer) because of slow I/O -- so that great attempt from Microsoft doesn't work for all.

Re: Moving on from Rails and What’s Next

#33

Post by learc83 »

pault wrote: post #25
learc83 wrote: post #18

Earlier quoted context omitted.

If they're not deploying on windows though, there isn't much reason to develop on it.

That's what I'm saying. It's not uncommon for companies to have AWS linux infrastructure for deployment but give everyone windows laptops for development. Don't ask me, ask the IT department.

Are they running Linux VMs? Everywhere I've worked, I'm one of the few who's not on a Mac, so I'm not familiar with companies like this.

Re: Moving on from Rails and What’s Next

#34

Post by inferiorhuman »

cocochanel wrote: post #10
freehunter wrote: post #2

I’ve seen a number of people move from Rails to Rust... is that really a common move? Seems like they’re very different and designed for very different things. Are people commonly building web applications in Rust? I know it’s possible but C++ has web frameworks too and that seems like a more apt comparison. I guess I’m just baffled by the number of people on here that I see pointing to Rust as the next project they…

Correct, they are for completely different purposes. I have the feeling that a lot of people (particularly the bloggers/more vocal types) jump into newer languages for no other reason than to position themselves as experts in said language/stack, right when it's getting more popular. I've seen this happen with Ruby/Rails, JavaScript/Node, and now Rust. In this case, it would have made a lot more sense to move to some…

I cut my teeth on Ruby and Rails, I've screwed around with Phoenix, and I'm currently infatuated with Rust. Earlier on I thought that, yeah, Rust is a great replacement for C and not something want to write a web app in. So, sure, I've got a bunch of little doodads written in Rust (mostly CLI tools). Now? The fluff I've written in Elixir is getting ported to Rust.

The Rust tooling and community are just that good. I'd rather have to work on some extra verbosity and maybe even maintain my own helper library in Rust than deal with with Elixir/Phoenix at this point. The number one reason is that Elixir deployments are nothing short of a nightmare. I've found the community not particularly helpful or knowledgeable about how things work (and given how many moving pieces are in an Elixir deployment, and how brittle Elixir deployments are, this is a terrible thing). And you're definitely not going to write CLI tools in Elixir (it straight doesn't work with escript in the first place).

Compiling down into a single "static" binary like Rust (and Go) do by default is a huge win for things like this. The quick startup time of a Rust or Go app compared to Ruby or anything JVM based is great for rapid iteration and testing. The tooling around Rust is, in general, fantastic. Being that much of a pleasure to use really makes up for how inappropriate it is to use Rust for most high level web app things.

Phoenix had a lot of promise, but these days I'd much rather go back to Rails or Django (with an eye towards how to migrate to a compiled language) if I needed to churn something out quickly.

Re: Moving on from Rails and What’s Next

#35

Post by inferiorhuman »

cbHXBY1D wrote: post #31
cocochanel wrote: post #10

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Correct, they are for completely different purposes. I have the feeling that a lot of people (particularly the bloggers/more vocal types) jump into newer languages for no other reason than to position themselves as experts in said language/stack, right when it's getting more popular. I've seen this happen with Ruby/Rails, JavaScript/Node, and now Rust. In this case, it would have made a lot more sense to move to some…

I think this is one of the reasons the Rust community is so much more focused on web related technologies than other software. Web servers are where most of the community is coming from and how they make a living so it makes sense. TUIs are also popular but I would love to see more emphasis on getting cross platform GUIs working (as well as kernels, codecs, drivers, graphics, data science, etc). Mmstick had a good po…

I tend to agree with those that suggest OO languages are far better suited for GUIs than Rust. I love traits, but all the GUI libraries for Rust I've seen are hot messes. The TUI stuff isn't much better (e.g. Cursive is borked on Windows).

I'd LOVE to see something along the lines of Qt for Rust, but I'm not going to hold my breath.

Re: Moving on from Rails and What’s Next

#36

Post by inferiorhuman »

geowwy wrote: post #26
fizx wrote: post #9

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I think it's less about the working style and more about the promise of working in the future(tm). When Rails 0.9 dropped in 2004, I instantly rewrote my old PHP app in it and never looked back. It just felt so expressive and naturally declarative. Rust has a similar amount of promise, though not quite as good of a demo. The idea that you can write high-performance code without typical high-performance code bugs is a…

> The idea that you can write high-performance code without > typical high-performance code bugs is amazing! There's a whole > new type of type system that ensures it! I just can't see how Rust is a good choice for web dev. There's a lot of mental overhead to writing Rust. Something like C#/Kotlin/Go will avoid all the same bugs and give you 95% of the performance while being much easier to code.

I just can't see how Rust is a good choice for web dev. There's a lot of mental overhead to writing Rust. Something like C#/Kotlin/Go will avoid all the same bugs and give you 95% of the performance while being much easier to code.

Rust is dramatically lower level than something like Ruby or Python. But sometimes the promise of really usable dependency and project management with something like Cargo wins out over the minimalist approach that Go takes. Rust (and something like Rocket.rs) wouldn't be my first choice for anything other than smaller personal projects, but it's not nearly as awkward as PHP was before it matured... and it's nowhere near as bad as rolling everything from scratch in C++.

It also depends on your target audience. My experience has been that Rust is significantly more portable than C#, Node, Elixir, and (to some extent) Go. Java (and by extension things like Kotlin and Clojure) have a big leg up here too.

Re: Moving on from Rails and What’s Next

#37

Post by pjmlp »

cheschire wrote: post #20
learc83 wrote: post #11

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I don't see rust as a natural move from Ruby at all. I think it's just people moving to next cool language. A few years ago when Go was at the peak of the hype cycle, you saw a lot of people moving there from Rails. Rails to Phoenix/Elixr makes some sense. As for me, I'm moving backwards in the hype cycle. I started out with Ruby as my first programming language 15 years ago, but I'm spending more and more time in C#…

C# and TypeScript make for a powerful combination when developing web-based solutions, with the added benefit of making you flexible to switch over into desktop or server applications. Or, if you're feeling froggy, an entire OS (Cosmos). Doesn't it feel so much nicer to just focus on the domain problems of new tasks without relearning how to talk to the computer?

Which is why I prefer platform languages, slowly adopting the best parts of trendy languages, no need to keep switching to the next shinning thing.

Pick platforms, not languages. But always learn what the others bring into the table as well.

Re: Moving on from Rails and What’s Next

#38

Post by pjmlp »

> The problem is that working on MIT/Apache licensed software doesn’t exactly help pay the bills. That’s why I’m asking for your help. I’ve spent the last 5 years having a single company sponsor my open source work. This time I’m going to try something different. Right now my goal is to get a handful of medium sized grants from larger companies to support my work on crates.io. If you work for a company that might be interested in helping sponsor me, please reach out.

This is the crux of the problem which seems left unadressed in the comments.

If it feels nice to enjoy those consulting rates, give something back.

Re: Moving on from Rails and What’s Next

#39

Post by gigatexal »

ajmurmann wrote: post #14
gigatexal wrote: post #5

I would have thought rails to golang so I too am surprised. I wish I had millions and could be a patron saint of sorts for people like the author. Open source funding is so broken as the companies that build upon the vast open source and often free software don’t do much in the way of donating or otherwise supporting the companies or individuals behind the projects.

Ruby has developer happiness as one of its main goals. Go on the other hand seems to have a lot of narratives around keeping the language small even if it's inconvenient. Add to that that Rust with Cargo has a package manager that will fell just like home to Ruby devs, whereas Go brought package managing back to the dark ages. => All this makes it hard to get excited about Go. Rust on the other hand comes with a bunc…

To be fair Golang modules fixed this somewhat. To that end, go modules are not cargo or ruby gems.

Re: Moving on from Rails and What’s Next

#40

Post by uxcolumbo »

inferiorhuman wrote: post #34
cocochanel wrote: post #10

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Correct, they are for completely different purposes. I have the feeling that a lot of people (particularly the bloggers/more vocal types) jump into newer languages for no other reason than to position themselves as experts in said language/stack, right when it's getting more popular. I've seen this happen with Ruby/Rails, JavaScript/Node, and now Rust. In this case, it would have made a lot more sense to move to some…

I cut my teeth on Ruby and Rails, I've screwed around with Phoenix, and I'm currently infatuated with Rust. Earlier on I thought that, yeah, Rust is a great replacement for C and not something want to write a web app in. So, sure, I've got a bunch of little doodads written in Rust (mostly CLI tools). Now? The fluff I've written in Elixir is getting ported to Rust. The Rust tooling and community are just that good. I'…

I'm currently looking into learning Elixir, but your comment sprinkled some doubts on that.

If deployment was easier in the Elixir world, would you have stuck with it?

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