Can't be answered with no other information (People available for hire for your area / company in RoR), your previous experience etc. but as another Go developer that jumped on RoR for my side projects a few years ago I can only encourage you. It brings the fun back into getting something running quickly without having to implement every crud operation manually.
Ask HN: Would you still choose Ruby on Rails for a startup in 2025?
41–50 of 182 posts
Re: Ask HN: Would you still choose Ruby on Rails for a startup in 2025?
#42Earlier quoted context omitted.
I've found Rails over the last few versions to be very easy to upgrade. Where I've had problems it's been 3rd party libraries that try to force alternatives to core behaviour like ActiveModel but then break their own API a year down the line. cough Looking at you Dry::Validation. You just do things like sticking to POROs for business logic it's pretty smooth. I just follow the advice in the Sustainable Rails book. ht…
Yeah, that's why I said I have no idea why that is. I'm sure it's not caused by Rails but rather some kind of secondary associative reason. (ie, rails devs leave and they have a hard time replacing with seniors or something). Coming from a Python background I find it weird. But it's definitely a thing.
It really depends on the project size and amount of dependencies. Ruby is very flexible, so dependencies can make a huge mess. Vanilla Rails doesn’t have those issues.
Re: Ask HN: Would you still choose Ruby on Rails for a startup in 2025?
#43The biggest risk when going with a long established solution is the potential danger of picking something that is on its way out of the zeitgeist. Not that picking your tech stack should be a popularity contest (and in fact many people make the wrong choice by chasing trends), but picking a component that has been left behind can have some real consequences (e.g. might become increasingly harder to find good talent for it).
But your post mentioned RoR is having a bit of a renaissance. Its maintainers are still invested in it, and there’s enough of a community that you’ll find support. To me that sort of answers your question.
I’ll also say I’ve learned to take opinions about technologies on HN with a grain of salt. You’ll often find someone gushing about something and then find out, it’s someone in a team of one working on a greenfield project. Their take may not be at all relevant depending on your specific situation.
Re: Ask HN: Would you still choose Ruby on Rails for a startup in 2025?
#44Yes Rails 8 is great. However, pick what the team knows best. For example at a startup doing AI/ML where everyone already knows Python and we're doing a lot with Pandas and Jupyter, we're choosing to build our website CMS by using Django & HTMX.
BTW shoutout to the Loco team, for my favorite new web framework. If you're already working with Rust in general, and your business requires extreme speed and extreme reliability-- beyond simple horizontal scaling CPU/GPU/K8-- then take a look at the stack of Loco + Axum + Tokio + Rust.
Re: Ask HN: Would you still choose Ruby on Rails for a startup in 2025?
#45For most, yes. Startups fail because they run out of money, not because the code runs slower. You need a mix of technology that lets you iterate fast, and cheap. Of course, I feel like there's a number of options that fit into that same bucket, and I'd consider Django among those.
Re: Ask HN: Would you still choose Ruby on Rails for a startup in 2025?
#46Yes, I would. In fact, I'd use any boring technology [0]. Anything that's been around and battle tested. If I was at a startup trying to solve a business problem, the last thing I'd want to do is bruise my knuckles fighting with my tools. Rails provides an opinionated way to structure your codebase as well as many existing modules that just work. It's not exclusive in this space, but it's a safe bet. You can get any…
Is it boring technology? I'm actually reluctant to pick up Rails because it had always been sold by the Basecamp cult and Jason Fried gives off Musk vibes. Many opinionated frameworks are also less reliable because of the layers of abstraction, so I'd also associate opinionated framework = sexy and temporary. I've never actually used Rails in production, just did some tutorial, so I'm probably wrong about this.
I think this depends on the context. I would argue that opinionated frameworks are *more* reliable, with the caveat that you need to know, and agree with those opinions.
I think of RoR, Laravel, Next.js, and Django etc. like I'm crowdsourcing my apps architecture so I can just worry about building out my business logic.
Even if you don't choose a framework at some point you end up building your own framework and introducing new opinions anyway, what I often see in these homegrown frameworks are.
1. Somewhat conflicting opinions expressed across different layers of abstraction that you build into your app over time.
2. In not having an opinion you try to satisfy many ways of solving problems introducing more edge case problems and serious over engineering.
Re: Ask HN: Would you still choose Ruby on Rails for a startup in 2025?
#47Rails is a battle tested choice. Nothing wrong with it.
There is no silver bullet that would fit every startup situation.
I think the safest "boring" stack is PHP with Symfony. It is super easy to deploy, has gotten really good support for gradual typing, very battle tested, good package management and easy to find devs for.
Plus you can run your project on a $5 shared hosting and not worry about dev ops and stuff, massively reducing costs.
Now, if you know you want to do anything AI, then using Python is also a great option. Also Flask is amazing for making Microservices. The packaging story sucks but there are ways to cope and you will dockerize everything anyway.
Or if you are planning on something more challenging which could profit from being on BEAM, why not go the Elixir route? They are still working on the gradual typing features but they are getting there and the functional style helps a lot with managing your state.
So yeah, depends what you need. I think golang is excellent for microservices but lacks a good Rails-style framework for cultural reasons. And you shouldn't really go microservice in a startup if you don't have very specific needs.
So well, pick your poison. The great thing about backend is that your customers don't care what you use. Might as well deploy Common Lisp if your hearts tells you to.
Re: Ask HN: Would you still choose Ruby on Rails for a startup in 2025?
#48Yes, I would. In fact, I'd use any boring technology [0]. Anything that's been around and battle tested. If I was at a startup trying to solve a business problem, the last thing I'd want to do is bruise my knuckles fighting with my tools. Rails provides an opinionated way to structure your codebase as well as many existing modules that just work. It's not exclusive in this space, but it's a safe bet. You can get any…
Rails (and its ecosystem) is anything but boring with Turbo/Hotwire, StimulusJS, a shift away from queues using Redis to the database w/ Solid Queue, a reexamination of how SQLite can be used as a prod database (when tuned), and a new rich text editor on the way…
Some of these are eyebrow raising and certainly not boring!
Re: Ask HN: Would you still choose Ruby on Rails for a startup in 2025?
#49Sure, whatever you're comfortable with. On a startup, failure risk is high, choose something boring that's easy to hire for and most of all, you're comfortable with.
Even if it turns out to become tech debt in the future, you won't have to pay for it until you're successful anyway.
Re: Ask HN: Would you still choose Ruby on Rails for a startup in 2025?
#50No. However, Rails addresses many items on The List. Hence, it's worth using it as a checklist. In reality, things like cache-busting codes are pretty straightforward to write in and choices about how to represent database entities and validate incoming data require contextual and experiential validation, one size (ActiveRecord) truly doesn't fit all. One is well served to learn Rails for many reasons, but i would no…
I'm building a trial balloon in Crystal right now, though not Amber or Lucky. They had their 1.0 release (1.15, even), but it does not feel ready for production. The documentation is not great, the gotchas are unintuitive, and the discussion feels like they're not sure what direction to take the language. The runtime (event loop, fiber scheduler, and garbage collector) dependency means there's plenty of "magic" involved, making it feel significantly more like a framework than a language. Maybe that makes sense if they're targeting the web. If you're on the fence about choosing an established framework like Rails, though, Crystal is not the direction to go yet.