Autotuner: How to speed up your Rails app • Hacker News Board

Re: Autotuner: How to speed up your Rails app

#11

Post by RowanH » Thu, Apr 25, 2024, 3:02 PM UTC

andrewmutz wrote: post #7

I love to see how active and vibrant the Rails community is. I used to be concerned about the viability of building new companies in Rails, since the ruby share of languages is so low these days. Based on the still-healthy community and the ridiculous productivity level that a developer can have with Rails 7+ (turbo, morph, stimulus) I still think its a fantastic stack to build a company with.

I would imagine with cutbacks on spending/investing I think people getting leaner and meaner will re-visit the sheer productivity you can get out of it.

Sure shaving the last 10/10ths of having a SPA with simple API based back end gets the ultimate user experience and speed but that cost curve goes up significantly for that last 10th (if you were to compared to an 'old school' Rails app)

I can't even fathom what it would have taken to build our startups' product in say React + Node (as an example..) vs OG Rails SSR. I look at a "sort of" competitor in our industry, and their rate of feature development is ridiculously slow by comparison.

Re: Autotuner: How to speed up your Rails app

#12

Post by mdaniel » Thu, Apr 25, 2024, 3:43 PM UTC

regularfry wrote: post #5

ajmurmann wrote: post #4

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The problem is the "just switching" typically means a full rewrite and has a ton of logistic challenges. Are you gonna higher an entire second team? What happens to feature work on the current system? If you keep going full-throttle on features, you'll never catch up. If you stop developing features for a prolonged time, you are putting your entire business at risk. Writing new services in Java might help, but still…

Rails on JRuby was a tenable proposition last I looked. Been a while though.

I believe TruffleRuby https://github.com/oracle/truffleruby> is the state of the art for Ruby on the JVM, and https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=33503622> says that Mastodon works on it, so that's one data point. I haven't worked up the emotional energy to try to get GitLab to run on it

Re: Autotuner: How to speed up your Rails app

#13

Post by ecshafer » Thu, Apr 25, 2024, 4:42 PM UTC

RowanH wrote: post #11

andrewmutz wrote: post #7

I love to see how active and vibrant the Rails community is. I used to be concerned about the viability of building new companies in Rails, since the ruby share of languages is so low these days. Based on the still-healthy community and the ridiculous productivity level that a developer can have with Rails 7+ (turbo, morph, stimulus) I still think its a fantastic stack to build a company with.

I would imagine with cutbacks on spending/investing I think people getting leaner and meaner will re-visit the sheer productivity you can get out of it. Sure shaving the last 10/10ths of having a SPA with simple API based back end gets the ultimate user experience and speed but that cost curve goes up significantly for that last 10th (if you were to compared to an 'old school' Rails app) I can't even fathom what it w…

If you haven't given Turbo and Stimulus a shot, I would recommend it. Way faster to write than React, and super fast and performant. I would say its definitely the way to go with Rails pages that aren't extremely simple.

Re: Autotuner: How to speed up your Rails app

#14

Post by rubymancer » Thu, Apr 25, 2024, 4:59 PM UTC

RowanH wrote: post #11

andrewmutz wrote: post #7

I love to see how active and vibrant the Rails community is. I used to be concerned about the viability of building new companies in Rails, since the ruby share of languages is so low these days. Based on the still-healthy community and the ridiculous productivity level that a developer can have with Rails 7+ (turbo, morph, stimulus) I still think its a fantastic stack to build a company with.

I would imagine with cutbacks on spending/investing I think people getting leaner and meaner will re-visit the sheer productivity you can get out of it. Sure shaving the last 10/10ths of having a SPA with simple API based back end gets the ultimate user experience and speed but that cost curve goes up significantly for that last 10th (if you were to compared to an 'old school' Rails app) I can't even fathom what it w…

> I look at a "sort of" competitor in our industry, and their rate of feature development is ridiculously slow by comparison.

Seconded. At my org, Ruby/Rails is our competitive advantage.

Our 5-6 competitors are all Java/.NET shops -- we deliver fixes and new features dramatically faster and deploy them with ease. It gets noticed.

The main downside is rails doesn't scale well re: complexity so regular refactors are necessary (ours is a high-volume big data app).

For performance/cost, it took some doing but by strategically moving business logic to higher performance techs we've even managed to get to a great spot there.

Re: Autotuner: How to speed up your Rails app

#15

Post by bdcravens » Thu, Apr 25, 2024, 4:59 PM UTC

andrewmutz wrote: post #7

I love to see how active and vibrant the Rails community is. I used to be concerned about the viability of building new companies in Rails, since the ruby share of languages is so low these days. Based on the still-healthy community and the ridiculous productivity level that a developer can have with Rails 7+ (turbo, morph, stimulus) I still think its a fantastic stack to build a company with.

3-4 years ago I was convinced that Rails was in its sunset years. JS had all the energy, Ruby conferences were disappearing, and it seemed like there was no new open-source development happening: we were all just using the same gems we'd used for years.

I'm happy to say that I was proven very wrong. New conferences have sprung up, over-the-wire is trending well against SPAs, and there's been a ton of new features and approaches that have kept Rails and Ruby very relevant to modern development.

Re: Autotuner: How to speed up your Rails app

#16

Post by bdcravens » Thu, Apr 25, 2024, 5:06 PM UTC

RowanH wrote: post #11

andrewmutz wrote: post #7

I love to see how active and vibrant the Rails community is. I used to be concerned about the viability of building new companies in Rails, since the ruby share of languages is so low these days. Based on the still-healthy community and the ridiculous productivity level that a developer can have with Rails 7+ (turbo, morph, stimulus) I still think its a fantastic stack to build a company with.

I would imagine with cutbacks on spending/investing I think people getting leaner and meaner will re-visit the sheer productivity you can get out of it. Sure shaving the last 10/10ths of having a SPA with simple API based back end gets the ultimate user experience and speed but that cost curve goes up significantly for that last 10th (if you were to compared to an 'old school' Rails app) I can't even fathom what it w…

I remember what happened in the early 2000s and how companies pulled back on the tech they were using. A few years ago I was convinced that fat front-end stacks are a luxury of companies with "free" money, and that the industry would be making tough choices. (To be clear, there are applications that the SPA approach is best for, but many applications are being built that could just as well be served by an old-school PHP and Jquery app)

Re: Autotuner: How to speed up your Rails app

#17

Post by atomicnumber3 » Thu, Apr 25, 2024, 5:29 PM UTC

andrewmutz wrote: post #7

I love to see how active and vibrant the Rails community is. I used to be concerned about the viability of building new companies in Rails, since the ruby share of languages is so low these days. Based on the still-healthy community and the ridiculous productivity level that a developer can have with Rails 7+ (turbo, morph, stimulus) I still think its a fantastic stack to build a company with.

I normally interview in Java, partly because I know it's deepest demons, and partly because pretty much anywhere will let you interview in it.

But recently I interviewed for a staff engineer position and there was a portion that was "API programming." Just writing a basic REST API to CRUD a model object. And I was like, oh my god, I know what I have to do. So I used rails. It was an hour and 15 minute block, and I ran the interviewer out of extensions to the problem after 30-40 mins. So we just chatted for 20 more and then both went to an early dinner.

(Unfortunately I didn't get the job - they were hiring a staff engineer but afaict ended up downgrading the seat to a senior engineer spot (50% the total comp) and rejected me and the other guy who was interviewing for the staff spot.)

But damn did I feel like I properly represented Ruby and rails in that one interview.

Re: Autotuner: How to speed up your Rails app

#18

Post by nickjj » Thu, Apr 25, 2024, 5:36 PM UTC

ecshafer wrote: post #13

RowanH wrote: post #11

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I would imagine with cutbacks on spending/investing I think people getting leaner and meaner will re-visit the sheer productivity you can get out of it. Sure shaving the last 10/10ths of having a SPA with simple API based back end gets the ultimate user experience and speed but that cost curve goes up significantly for that last 10th (if you were to compared to an 'old school' Rails app) I can't even fathom what it w…

If you haven't given Turbo and Stimulus a shot, I would recommend it. Way faster to write than React, and super fast and performant. I would say its definitely the way to go with Rails pages that aren't extremely simple.

Yep, and you can also use it with any stack. I've successfully used both with Flask.

Re: Autotuner: How to speed up your Rails app

#19

Post by x0x0 » Thu, Apr 25, 2024, 5:37 PM UTC

andrewmutz wrote: post #7

I love to see how active and vibrant the Rails community is. I used to be concerned about the viability of building new companies in Rails, since the ruby share of languages is so low these days. Based on the still-healthy community and the ridiculous productivity level that a developer can have with Rails 7+ (turbo, morph, stimulus) I still think its a fantastic stack to build a company with.

with hotwire, rails is nearly a superpower. 90% of what react gives you at a tiny fraction of the dev time costs.

Re: Autotuner: How to speed up your Rails app

#20

Post by princevegeta89 » Thu, Apr 25, 2024, 6:05 PM UTC

andrewmutz wrote: post #7

I love to see how active and vibrant the Rails community is. I used to be concerned about the viability of building new companies in Rails, since the ruby share of languages is so low these days. Based on the still-healthy community and the ridiculous productivity level that a developer can have with Rails 7+ (turbo, morph, stimulus) I still think its a fantastic stack to build a company with.

Ruby is incredible. It is still one of the best choices for a platform to build a company or a product quickly with. If it cannot keep up with your scale, throw more hardware at it and it will still be worth it in terms of time and man-hours saved.

I only ever wanted compile-time linting and better autocompletion such as in the case of Elixir LS. Does something like that exist for Ruby now? How is Crystal these days?