Twitter survives election after Ruby-to-JVM move

The rumors of Java's death are, indeed, greatly exaggerated.

> None of this will be welcome news to the army of fanatical Ruby developers who believe the language's syntax, its high developer productivity, and its overall philosophy far outweigh any performance disadvantage it might have compared to other languages.

I'm a relative newbie to the Ruby world, but as best I can tell, the Ruby and Rails communities both accepted long ago that they weren't made for Twitter levels of traffic.

Fact is, almost no one has Twitter levels of traffic besides Twitter. That's why Ruby and Rails are still so popular, because for ~99% of performance needs, they're more than capable and also extremely pleasant to work with.

The novice programmer says: "My language is better than yours."

The wise programmer says: "Use the right tool for the job."

Please HN, we're wiser than trending stories would suggest.

It's interesting that when it comes time to scale to serve enormous loads, you have to be willing to change fundamental parts of your stack which you've made a huge investment in. Ruby holds up well enough on the majority of the sites that use it, but when you have traffic the size that Twitter does, it's just not good enough. And it turns out that Java provides a nice tradeoff with high performance and high-level code.

It's also interesting to see different companies approach this problem differently - Facebook famously recreated a way to run their PHP source code (by compiling it to C and then running it natively) instead of actually rewriting the source to a different language. I wonder if something similar would have been possible for Twitter, or if they weren't happy with how their existing code was structured in the first place which may have made the rewrite more attractive.

Ive heard that Java is DSL for turning large blocks of XML into stack traces. But it does it fast and reliably.