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Ask HN: Would you still choose Ruby on Rails for a startup in 2025?

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Re: Ask HN: Would you still choose Ruby on Rails for a startup in 2025?

#81

Post by anonfordays »

a-priori wrote: post #37
muzani wrote: post #28

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

The worst part about Rails is the 37signals people, in particular DHH. But the good news is that you can just ignore them and enjoy the framework, like I do.

>The worst part about Rails is the 37signals people, in particular DHH.

Why? What is wrong with DHH?

Re: Ask HN: Would you still choose Ruby on Rails for a startup in 2025?

#82

Post by desselbane »

Absolutely not. DHH is problematic and the foundation doesn't seem to really have a voice beyond his. The technology is great, but the community does have a problem with leadership - and not having a leadership team own the branding and communication is problematic long term. Yes, there have been many changes recently but it's only been because DHH approves of it - it's not really consensus driven by different experiences using Ruby on Rails.

Look at the trademark of other tools and you'll see that they are owned and driven by groups of people who share common ground and come to decisions that are in the interest of making technology better - not because one person was convinced of the idea it (look at how TypeScript was ripped out because DHH didn't like it).

I've been working with Ruby on Rails since 2007 and I love where it's at right now and the direction it's going, but I cannot fully trust a framework that is at the whims of one person.

Re: Ask HN: Would you still choose Ruby on Rails for a startup in 2025?

#83

Post by anonfordays »

kowfm wrote: post #80
muzani wrote: post #28

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 definitely recommend using Ruby, and Rails. The Jason Fried and David Hansson Musk/Fascist vibes are real and are a problem. Most of the people in the Ruby community recognize that problem and are taking steps to mitigate that issue. Most of the core Rails committers don't work for 37 signals, and it's not really a thing made just by them. Definitely use Rails to start a new project. The real hero here is Ruby and…

>The Jason Fried and David Hansson Musk/Fascist vibes are real and are a problem.

What do you mean by this? Where have Jason Fried or David Hansson supported fascism? Your account is ten years old and this is the first comment you've ever made.

Re: Ask HN: Would you still choose Ruby on Rails for a startup in 2025?

#84

Post by xutopia »

I’m currently using Hotwire Native with a rails 8 app building a new project and I’m banging out features faster than anything I’ve used in the past. Furthermore so much can be done on the web side to prototype features on mobile with this setup.

Rails all the way for me!

Re: Ask HN: Would you still choose Ruby on Rails for a startup in 2025?

#85

Post by alexdowad »

I've worked on numerous Rails projects since 2010, and it has lots of strengths, but I would really hesitate to base a new project on Rails.

The benefits of using a big framework (which you alluded to in your question) are easy to see in the short term. The pain comes in the long term.

Of course, there's no panacea. Your current "simple and low-dependency" approach has its own challenges, so choose your poison.

Re: Ask HN: Would you still choose Ruby on Rails for a startup in 2025?

#86

Post by bluerooibos »

anonfordays wrote: post #81
a-priori wrote: post #37

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The worst part about Rails is the 37signals people, in particular DHH. But the good news is that you can just ignore them and enjoy the framework, like I do.

>The worst part about Rails is the 37signals people, in particular DHH. Why? What is wrong with DHH?

Some people love him, some hate him.

It's also possible to appreciate the stuff he's done for software whilst not being in love with him as a person.

Re: Ask HN: Would you still choose Ruby on Rails for a startup in 2025?

#87

Post by noodle »

Yes, no question, assuming Rails matches what the startup is trying to do well enough. I've worked in other frameworks, stacks, etc and nothing beats the raw productivity of Rails for web applications.

A lot of people say things like "the difficulty with Rails is in the long term". To them I'd say two things:

- In starting a new company, I'd assume failure as the starting point and do everything I can to wrestle success from the jaws of failure. I don't want to waste time worrying about what will happen in the long term, because statistically we won't get to the long term. I'll take every advantage I can get to get over that statistical hump. Rails gives me that advantage on the engineering front.

- I'm currently working in a Rails codebase along with a few hundred other developers and its fine. It isn't great, largely because it was an inherited codebase I was acquired into and the OGs made some (imo) sub-optimal decisions, but it isn't really any different than working on a java project with a few hundred devs. Its fine at scale.

Re: Ask HN: Would you still choose Ruby on Rails for a startup in 2025?

#88

Post by cullenking »

I am the CTO of http://ridewithgps.com which is a rails monolith that is 18 years old now. We still have original code from 18 years ago in a few spots. I am pretty biased, but I would use it for a new project in a heartbeat. It's just so easy to be incredibly productive in.

There are other great frameworks, but a monolithic rails app serving up an API for a react client and two mobile clients is just so dang easy to work in if you get along with it.

As far as performance is concerned, we will do between 1,000 and 2,000 dynamic requests a second this year with no caching during our peak season. Not crazy traffic, but respectable enough. They aren't trivial requests, depending on the user making the request and how much content their account has in it, and how many connections their content has to other users and content. We also do a significant amount of fitness / geo data processing. We'll probably be ingesting between 1,000,000 and 2,000,000 recorded fitness activities per day at our peak this year. This will comfortably fit on a couple of app servers. My performance worries are all focused at the database layer. About once a year we go in and pick all the low hanging performance fruit for 2-4 weeks, and every few years we buy some new app servers to replace old ones. Scaling has never been a real problem, but we are definitely small potatoes compared to many projects out there tackling real scaling issues.

That being said, I put up a PR against our frontend react repo every once in a while, and I am super jealous of the work they put in on typescript and CI. It puts some huge guardrails on development that are a productivity boost, with of course a decent up front investment in all the tooling and the requisite maintenance.

Re: Ask HN: Would you still choose Ruby on Rails for a startup in 2025?

#89

Post by RadiozRadioz »

rohan_ wrote: post #66
RadiozRadioz wrote: post #58

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> any modern language should support this It seems that people who use Visual Studio Code expect LSP to exist for every language for some reason, then blame the language itself when it doesn't, as this commenter did. It's strange to me. It isn't that the language doesn't support VSCode, the problem is that VSCode doesn't support the language. VSCode is the bad thing, not the language. > elite engineers will not want…

Your comment is profoundly ignorant. The Language Server Protocol is a standard across all modern editors. It's the reason for the resurgence of Neovim. It is absolutely the responsibility of the language to provide a language server. > Engineers who care more about the specific web technology being used rather than solving the problem don't sound like "elite" engineers. Naive

Enlighten me, elite engineer. Why does liking NextJS make you elite?

> standard across all modern editors

This is incorrect. It is Microsoft's open standard that _some_ modern editors have chosen to implement. For example, JetBrains IDEs & Sublime text have no native support, only limited support only through extensions/plugins.

> It is absolutely the responsibility of the language to provide a language server.

Actually, it's absolutely the wild west. Most LSP implementations are not made by the language's foundation, including those of the most popular languages: https://microsoft.github.io/language-server-protocol/impleme...

Again, this is an extremely recent standard, 2016, that services some text editors. This is not something foundational for all language authors.

My main point is: If your editor experience is bad when using Ruby, then your editor is bad for Ruby. Regardless of if your editor uses LSP or something else. The language itself is not at fault.

Re: Ask HN: Would you still choose Ruby on Rails for a startup in 2025?

#90

Post by adverbly »

It depends.

I'd probably pick it for any medium complexity low traffic saas that doesn't have any crazy infra or ML or staffing requirements.

It's a nice sweet spot for many companies.

With high complexity you probably want strict types.

With high traffic you probably want better perf like rust or go.

With ML you want python.

With ease of hiring or low complexity backend but high complexity frontend, you probably want Next or node.

But for something like 50% of saas companies, I think rails is probably a really strong choice. A very small team can move super fast. It really is the one man framework <3

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