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

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 dev that's familiar with rails to ramp up pretty quick. If you rolled a custom web framework in a dialect of javascript you may have a more challenging time.

0: https://boringtechnology.club

Ironically, one of the reasons my startup died was using Elixir as if it was Rails[1].

Even aside from type safety considerations: in RoR variable bindings appear out of thin air! Imagine onboarding a new developer – not only do they need to learn the arcane language, but then they need to learn a bunch of non-hygienic macros!

I remember the lightbulb moment when I was patching Ruby's Devise authentication library to add verifiable credentials to it when I realised that a variable used there is not a 0-ary function, but actually something that is just bound in context by magic. Also, even Rails experts have to go on a hunt to understand magic[2] too!

I would personally just use typescript bridged to rust to preserve types ans sqlx for type-safe queries to the database.

Or use something like bubble.io if you want to iterate on ad hoc things until you get there!

[1]: https://memorici.de/posts/pre-mortem/ [2]: https://medium.com/launch-school/params-in-rails-where-do-th...

Do you want to learn Ruby. Then go for it. If not pick a different language. Pick one you know.

You might not even need a full backend server. Firebase or Syperbase might be enough

Yes, it would be very hard for LLM to write this boilerplate.

It’s so long it would not fit in its limited context brain ;)