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Finding relationships between Ruby’s top packages and their dependencies

shopify.engineering

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Re: Finding relationships between Ruby’s top packages and their dependencies

#21

Post by Lio »

aliqot wrote: post #3

Aside from Shopify and others from that era, what modern SaaS offerings are choosing Rails (or Ruby) for their main app? I had one last peer still using Rails, and since Heroku's been on the ropes they're out. Other than DHH adherents, is anybody still excited about Rails? To draw an even smaller circle, is anybody still excited about Ruby when Rails isn't involved?

I still see a lot of Rails contract work out there, roughly as many roles as ever before.

I've thought about switching to Elixir work but I just don't see the demand there yet. There's 2 orders of magnitude more Rails roles than there are Elixir jobs. That might change with time hopefully.

I can only speak for myself but I think Rails 7 is the most exciting release for years.

Hotwire, Stimulus, et al are finally a compelling reason to do frontend work in Rails again vs the last few years of using it mainly as an API for JavaScript SPA frameworks.

Ruby 3 finally provides a decent solution for async IO (with fully parallel ractors a work in progress).

Tooling is also much improved over a few years ago with Sorbet and Treesitter AST based stuff.

Rails might be boring but boring gets the job done.

Re: Finding relationships between Ruby’s top packages and their dependencies

#22

Post by corytheboyd »

aliqot wrote: post #3

Aside from Shopify and others from that era, what modern SaaS offerings are choosing Rails (or Ruby) for their main app? I had one last peer still using Rails, and since Heroku's been on the ropes they're out. Other than DHH adherents, is anybody still excited about Rails? To draw an even smaller circle, is anybody still excited about Ruby when Rails isn't involved?

I use it all the time and just don't talk about it, because it's boring and does the job. Why? Because I know how it works, and can make functional things in minutes. It's my go to hammer when I need to build another stupid fucking website with a database. I don't care if it's "slow", I couldn't give less of a shit about the extra 12 cpu cycles every request needs, it is completely irrelevant because I'm not serving traffic to millions of concurrent users.

Re: Finding relationships between Ruby’s top packages and their dependencies

#23

Post by itake »

rsanheim wrote: post #19
wldcordeiro wrote: post #12

I'm pretty convinced Ruby and Python's package ecosystem has most of the same problems of JavaScript's but it's just not talked about as much. This article definitely has a lot of similarities to npm's MFA implementation and security concerns that have come up.

Not true at all, at least for Ruby. Most larger React projects have _far more_ dependencies_ than an equivalent Ruby project. You could chalk it up to a few things I think: * the JS ecosystem is just much larger - more devs (especially inexperienced ones) means more code and more copy/pasting solutions that rely on `npm install` from the web. * JS has just not been as stable and mature as Ruby or Python until the pas…

> * JS has just not been as stable and mature as Ruby or Python until the past couple of years (thanks to ES5/ES6), especially if you consider the browser acceptance of latest ES.

+1. I see way more of my js packages deprecated and renamed than ruby. There hasn't been a huge backwards compatibility issue in ruby since like ~2.7 (ruby 3 and 3.1 were easy), but hunting down which version of node the npm package works on is a huge pain.

Re: Finding relationships between Ruby’s top packages and their dependencies

#24

Post by RoddaWallPro »

rsanheim wrote: post #19
wldcordeiro wrote: post #12

I'm pretty convinced Ruby and Python's package ecosystem has most of the same problems of JavaScript's but it's just not talked about as much. This article definitely has a lot of similarities to npm's MFA implementation and security concerns that have come up.

Not true at all, at least for Ruby. Most larger React projects have _far more_ dependencies_ than an equivalent Ruby project. You could chalk it up to a few things I think: * the JS ecosystem is just much larger - more devs (especially inexperienced ones) means more code and more copy/pasting solutions that rely on `npm install` from the web. * JS has just not been as stable and mature as Ruby or Python until the pas…

My opinion is that the standard library of JS is so underwhelming that a high % of installs on NPM are for things that the standard library _should_ give you, but doesn't. Date/time, currency, csv, arbitrary precision decimals, int/bigint math, the entirety of lodash, etc. Give JS a fitting standard library, and I'd bet you see the dependency trees shrink by a factor of 10.

Re: Finding relationships between Ruby’s top packages and their dependencies

#25

Post by reducesuffering »

ericb wrote: post #10
aliqot wrote: post #3

Aside from Shopify and others from that era, what modern SaaS offerings are choosing Rails (or Ruby) for their main app? I had one last peer still using Rails, and since Heroku's been on the ropes they're out. Other than DHH adherents, is anybody still excited about Rails? To draw an even smaller circle, is anybody still excited about Ruby when Rails isn't involved?

> is anybody still excited about Ruby when Rails isn't involved? Far more excited than I am about JS when the browser isn't involved. > what modern SaaS offerings are choosing Rails Github, Airbnb, Shopify, Constant Contact, SlideShare, CrunchBase, Bloomberg, Yammer, GitLab, ZenDesk, Hashicorp, Hulu, Netflix.

GitHub is actively transitioning away from Rails. Netflix is mostly Java / Node.js, they are not a significant Rails shop. Also, OP said "modern", probably to mean not companies that chose their tech stack a decade ago. New SaaS these days trend towards Next.js / Node (Supabase, Substack, Notion, Planetscale, Railway, Secureframe, Newfront, etc.), some Django, the occasional Rails or Phoenix.

Re: Finding relationships between Ruby’s top packages and their dependencies

#26

Post by sparker72678 »

aliqot wrote: post #3

Aside from Shopify and others from that era, what modern SaaS offerings are choosing Rails (or Ruby) for their main app? I had one last peer still using Rails, and since Heroku's been on the ropes they're out. Other than DHH adherents, is anybody still excited about Rails? To draw an even smaller circle, is anybody still excited about Ruby when Rails isn't involved?

> To draw an even smaller circle, is anybody still excited about Ruby when Rails isn't involved?

I love Ruby, and I'm excited about where it is and where it's going. It's my go-to language for just about everything. I write automations with it, API clients with it, little just-for-me programs with it, little experiments with it.

Ruby is a beautiful, delightful object oriented language and I wouldn't want to work with anything else right now (especially not Javascript).

Re: Finding relationships between Ruby’s top packages and their dependencies

#27

Post by jamesfinlayson »

rsanheim wrote: post #19
wldcordeiro wrote: post #12

I'm pretty convinced Ruby and Python's package ecosystem has most of the same problems of JavaScript's but it's just not talked about as much. This article definitely has a lot of similarities to npm's MFA implementation and security concerns that have come up.

Not true at all, at least for Ruby. Most larger React projects have _far more_ dependencies_ than an equivalent Ruby project. You could chalk it up to a few things I think: * the JS ecosystem is just much larger - more devs (especially inexperienced ones) means more code and more copy/pasting solutions that rely on `npm install` from the web. * JS has just not been as stable and mature as Ruby or Python until the pas…

> If the team hasn't been very disciplined in updating and removing all transitive dependencies through the upgrades, you will inevitably end up with a ton of stuff (is `react-date-wrangler-jobber` used? I still see references to it, but is that page live? who knows!?) in your bundle hanging around and cluttering up your build.

Ah yep - last week I removed 25 (!) completely unused libraries from a package.json file.

> the React / npm stuff often ends up in a rats nest of conflicting dependencies

At a previous job we started with Webpack 3, right before Webpack 4 was released, and even months later a bunch of stuff still didn't work with Webpack 4.

Re: Finding relationships between Ruby’s top packages and their dependencies

#28

Post by Gigachad »

aliqot wrote: post #3

Aside from Shopify and others from that era, what modern SaaS offerings are choosing Rails (or Ruby) for their main app? I had one last peer still using Rails, and since Heroku's been on the ropes they're out. Other than DHH adherents, is anybody still excited about Rails? To draw an even smaller circle, is anybody still excited about Ruby when Rails isn't involved?

I think Rails still has a future in the same way C does. Not many are particularly excited about it and it's possibly not the right choice for new projects, but it has a very large existing app base that will continue for a long time.

IMO the biggest issue is the fact Ruby is untyped. Things like updating Rails is an absolute nightmare.

Re: Finding relationships between Ruby’s top packages and their dependencies

#29

Post by loktarogar »

aliqot wrote: post #3

Aside from Shopify and others from that era, what modern SaaS offerings are choosing Rails (or Ruby) for their main app? I had one last peer still using Rails, and since Heroku's been on the ropes they're out. Other than DHH adherents, is anybody still excited about Rails? To draw an even smaller circle, is anybody still excited about Ruby when Rails isn't involved?

> Other than DHH adherents, is anybody still excited about Rails?

I like Rails despite DHH. I'm a part of huge communities where people are still excited for Rails.

It might not be the newest thing but I love working in Rails. Kind of depressive when, every time Ruby comes up here (it's still a lot, which should be a better indicator), this same topic comes up. Not because i'm tied to the language, but that the joy I am having isn't shared.

Re: Finding relationships between Ruby’s top packages and their dependencies

#30

Post by vlz »

Lio wrote: post #21
aliqot wrote: post #3

Aside from Shopify and others from that era, what modern SaaS offerings are choosing Rails (or Ruby) for their main app? I had one last peer still using Rails, and since Heroku's been on the ropes they're out. Other than DHH adherents, is anybody still excited about Rails? To draw an even smaller circle, is anybody still excited about Ruby when Rails isn't involved?

I still see a lot of Rails contract work out there, roughly as many roles as ever before. I've thought about switching to Elixir work but I just don't see the demand there yet. There's 2 orders of magnitude more Rails roles than there are Elixir jobs. That might change with time hopefully. I can only speak for myself but I think Rails 7 is the most exciting release for years. Hotwire, Stimulus, et al are finally a co…

Can only agree. Rails 7 with Hotwire, Turbo, Stimulus is very much a different experience than earlier versions. The fact that Rails is still evolving and changing in such big strides makes me think that it could stay relevant longer than people might think.
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