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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?

#111

Post by ksec »

kenrose wrote: post #104

I’m the CTO at OpsLevel, where we’ve been running a Rails monolith for ~6 years. We started on Rails 5, upgraded to 7, and are currently moving to 8. Before this, I worked on Rails at PagerDuty (including splitting a monolith into microservices) and on Shopify’s “majestic” monolith. The best thing about Rails is its strong, opinionated defaults for building web applications. It handles HTTP request routing, data mars…

>For most web apps, the bottleneck is I/O, not CPU.

We just have blog post submission on HN that suggest otherwise. At least for RoR.

Luckily we have YJIT and we are finally understanding may be we are actually CPU bound, which means we could look into it rather than always thinking it is a I/O DB Problems.

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

#112

Post by robertlagrant »

gregors wrote: post #98
robertlagrant wrote: post #59

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> If you need to hire a sizeable team quickly, I would reach for Node or PHP. I always wonder about this. Surely the technology you pick influences the size of the team.

shopify, airbnb, github, hulu ....managed to make it work

That's not what I'm saying.

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

#113

Post by muzani »

anonfordays wrote: post #93
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'm actually reluctant to pick up Rails because it had always been sold by the Basecamp cult and Jason Fried gives off Musk vibes. Why? What "Musk vibes" have they given off?

Success because of A and attributing it to B. There's a bit of megalomania too. He has a beef against VC funding. He lost 1/3 of staff once when he implemented a policy of no personal opinions at Basecamp. He is often shared because of his unpopular opinions and his successes are used to fortify those opinions.

I'm not saying Fried or Musk are wrong, and they both have brilliant insights at times. If Musk was crazy and wrong all the time, he wouldn't be a brand name.

But both of them also appeal to susceptible people who seem to think that a few good opinions make them good all the time. Basecamp isn't even a good tool, it's a pretty average one, yet prettier than Jira. But it's down this funnel of people who will buy whatever Fried and DHH sell them.

And what I'm getting at is whether Rails is one of those things that is average but prettier than Node?

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

#114

Post by muzani »

ksec wrote: post #110
anonfordays wrote: post #93

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>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. Why? What "Musk vibes" have they given off?

If you are on certain political spectrum, then opposite political spectrum would certainly gives similar vibes as that spectrum's prominent figure.

I'm on the pro-VC, anti-bootstrap spectrum and so is Elon Musk. American political spectrum of right vs left, authorarian vs libertarian makes little sense to me.

My political compass tends to be BRICS vs G7, religious vs secular. If you're saying they're both G7-secular, I guess that makes sense too.

edit: Also I was not even aware of Musk and the fascist thing before posting the comment, and I can see how it may have been interpreted differently now, lol.

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

#115

Post by bigwheeler »

Absolutely. I’ve been using rails for almost 20 years, and it’s been mostly a joy to watch it evolve. I will say- there was a short period of time (the webpacker era) where it was losing its allure, but that already feels like a distant memory. For the last decade that I’ve been doing freelance/contract development, I’ve always been able to find plenty of Rails/Ruby work, so it still feels like a valuable thing to specialize in as well. And the Ruby community is just incredible. Rails motto should be “come for the productivity, stay for the community”.

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

#116

Post by ksec »

>Is Rails still that good?

It is but;

Coming from Go, you will likely find Ruby and Rails to be relatively slow. Depending your definition of performance that could be acceptable or a no go. However Your development speed may likely be 5 to 10x.

The good thing is that Ruby is not I/O Bound is finally gaining momentum. After years or decades of I/O Bound we have finally come to may be it really is more CPU bound than we admit it to be. And things are improving. YJIT improves real world performance by 20-40%. If you measure only the CPU part and not total response time that is 30-60% or in some cases even more. There are still more optimisation could be done.

Rails and ActiveRecord are also improving. Shopify, a $150B market cap company now has all the incentives to improve Rails. YJIT is work from Shopify.

And throw more hardware at it now makes sense more so than ever. CPU Cost / Core is falling faster than ever. Thanks to competition from AMD EPYC and AWS Graviton / ARM. 2026 we will have 256 Core Zen 6c. We may have 288 Core Darkmount this year. You could quite literally have a single monster server that is enough to serve unless your site is Top 5%.

Database is less of an issue, starting small you could use SQLite which is now well supported by Rails 8.0 and it is enough for most. Planning big just use PlanetScale which uses Rails internally and is being used by other Rails site including Github.

The whole ecosystem is basically ready for you to just work on business logics.

I am hoping we get more defaults, Rails finally get authentication with 8.0. but could do more work. We will hopefully see more improvements coming in Rails 8.1, and so much more to come from Ruby side as well.

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

#117

Post by muzani »

crowcroft wrote: post #46
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 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 intr…

For context, I've been in mobile for 10 years and in general it's the opposite - frameworks are rigid, but the layer under it shifts a lot. These frameworks tend to collapse in an earthquake like manner after multiple updates. We usually support iOS up to 2-3 years old, that's how bad it is.

The other approach is to build it on a platform that shifts with the changes, i.e. hybrid and web. But if you crack open the source of Cordova, you find all kinds of tangled, unmaintained, bad practice wiring and rewiring. I spent a few months trying to hack Cordova plugins and we decided to just scrap the entire code and build native; fully rewriting the app into a custom framework took 3 months.

However, it sounds like tools like Rails are built on a very sturdy platform that doesn't introduce breaking changes every year? That's an angle I haven't considered.

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

#118

Post by jjatinggoyal »

schappim wrote: post #48
tra3 wrote: post #11

Yes, 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!

I think they are launching a markdown editor, not rich text

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

#119

Post by mettamage »

gregors wrote: post #97
mettamage wrote: post #70

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Most companies don't do that in my experience. It'd have been easier to get hired over the years if they did.

It's always been a non-issue for me. However, when I do want to explore a new stack I generally go as a consultant or in a small startup i.e. not-well-funded. I'm more than willing to pay the price in wage for a few shorter-term engagements.

Ever since I'm a data analyst, I found that career happiness is more important than wages depending where someone is on the career happiness track. Software engineering is just a bit too much for me. Where I work now as a data a data analyst, keeps me sane. It's the diversity and variety of tasks that I like.
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