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Choosing Ruby on Rails for web development project in 2019

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Re: Choosing Ruby on Rails for web development project in 2019

#31

Post by faizshah »

Among my peers (undergrads in college) Rails has largely lost mindshare to python and Node (and even PHP!). At the 3 hackathons I went to this semester I could not find a single other person who knew Rails (so I always have to switch to node or python). If you take a look at devpost, Rails is increasingly losing popularity: https://devpost.com/software/built-with/ruby-on-rails

My plea to the Rails community and Rails senior devs:

1) Fully embrace SPAs as an option, React and Vue are ubiquitous among my peers. I've seriously seen people who have difficulty understanding a for loop that know how to use react at a basic level.

2) Increase your outreach to hackathons and universities, I'd love to see more Rails companies coming out to the big hackathons and mentoring students. At the biggest hackathon in MLH (Bitcamp 2019) I couldn't find a Rails or Ember mentor. I'd also love to see more courses on coursera and other places that teach Rails, in my search for Rails courses on Coursera I only found 1 course (although Traversy media has been making some great content on youtube)!

Re: Choosing Ruby on Rails for web development project in 2019

#32

Post by brightball »

sbov wrote: post #6

> Great for CPU-intensive tasks. Ruby is among the slowest languages out there. Which is fine for most webapps, but calling it great for CPU intensive tasks... I don't understand what logic is being used to come to this conclusion.

Rails is slow. Ruby isn’t slow.

Ruby has the same thing that every other language has, call outs to C code under the hood for most of the real work.

What makes Rails slow is the process around so much object creation and destruction, but this is exclusive to Rails itself.

You put a Sidekiq worker up against a Go worker for some background processing and the performance is comparable.

Re: Choosing Ruby on Rails for web development project in 2019

#33

Post by dschadd »

faizshah wrote: post #31

Among my peers (undergrads in college) Rails has largely lost mindshare to python and Node (and even PHP!). At the 3 hackathons I went to this semester I could not find a single other person who knew Rails (so I always have to switch to node or python). If you take a look at devpost, Rails is increasingly losing popularity: https://devpost.com/software/built-with/ruby-on-rails My plea to the Rails community and Rails…

To play devil's advocate, I am a junior dev in a relatively large US market and Rails is still very popular. I'm currently using it as the backend API for my side project. It's just simple and fun to code in.

Re: Choosing Ruby on Rails for web development project in 2019

#34

Post by abhiyerra »

dijit wrote: post #25
milo_im wrote: post #2

Fun story from Gitlab: When our Co-founder and Engineering Fellow Dmitriy Zaporozhets decided to build GitLab, he chose to do it with Ruby on Rails, despite working primarily in PHP at the time GitLab CEO Sid Sijbrandij thinks his co-founder made a good choice: "It's worked out really well because the Ruby on Rails ecosystem allows you to shape a lot of functionality at a high quality," he explained. "If you look at…

And yet, when I think of gitlab I think of the insane resources it consumes and the slowness of the system even when you overprovision by a factor of 2 on cpu. Not saying I dislike gitlab, I actually really like it and we use the on-prem gold edition licensed to 6k seats. (as in, I put my money where my mouth is when I say I like it) But of the things people complain about regarding rails that's that it's: large, hea…

I believe github onprem gets around the speed by using jruby? I’m sure that could be done with GitLab as well.

Re: Choosing Ruby on Rails for web development project in 2019

#35

Post by faizshah »

zerkten wrote: post #11
munmaek wrote: post #3

The beauty of rails is how simple and quick it is to get a robust (if bare) application up and running. Even if you use sinatra or padrino instead, the wealth of the web community built around ruby still makes it rather easy. If I were a tech lead and had to make a choice now, in 2019, I would still (probably) choose rails-api for a backend with some separate frontend. I've been slowly working on a backend for a web…

> I've been slowly working on a backend for a web app in Rust I'm interested in why you made the choice to use Rust for a web app? It feels like you love a good challenge, but there are obviously technical constraints for some apps. I look around and wonder if the options have really changed a whole lot since 2006? If you need productivity, choose Ruby or Python (or maybe JS.) Java and .NET exist if you have more exa…

Or if you need both, Yehuda Katz's company Tilde made a library that can help you write code in Rust and use it in Ruby. So if there's a critical path in Rails that you need to speed up in Rust you can do that: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=lBapt5YDDvg https://github.com/tildeio/helix

Re: Choosing Ruby on Rails for web development project in 2019

#36

Post by sdegutis »

brightball wrote: post #32
sbov wrote: post #6

> Great for CPU-intensive tasks. Ruby is among the slowest languages out there. Which is fine for most webapps, but calling it great for CPU intensive tasks... I don't understand what logic is being used to come to this conclusion.

Rails is slow. Ruby isn’t slow. Ruby has the same thing that every other language has, call outs to C code under the hood for most of the real work. What makes Rails slow is the process around so much object creation and destruction, but this is exclusive to Rails itself. You put a Sidekiq worker up against a Go worker for some background processing and the performance is comparable.

When Rails came out, Ruby was the slowest language by far because its interpreter literally just walked an AST. No intermediate byte code, no VM, it just eval'd an AST. This reputation stuck longer though, although yeah I imagine Ruby is still slower than Python and Node even now despite having a VM.

Re: Choosing Ruby on Rails for web development project in 2019

#37

Post by jaegerpicker »

I think I'd only ever choose RoR for a throwaway project, in 2019. I do love RoR and the development experience but Elixir and Phoenix give me almost exactly the same feeling but with WAY better performance and an Immutable/Functional language that results in much cleaner and better code. It's an investment to learn Elixir but it's 100% worth it and honestly I'd choose Phoenix over Rails almost every time.

Re: Choosing Ruby on Rails for web development project in 2019

#38

Post by realusername »

justaaron wrote: post #15

maybe consider https://amberframework.org/ it's fast. type-safe, and imitates scaffolding and other rails features...

I've contributed a bit to Amber but it's just not there yet unfortunately. The Crystal ecosystem is still a bit too small for my taste.

Re: Choosing Ruby on Rails for web development project in 2019

#39

Post by hrktb »

dijit wrote: post #25
milo_im wrote: post #2

Fun story from Gitlab: When our Co-founder and Engineering Fellow Dmitriy Zaporozhets decided to build GitLab, he chose to do it with Ruby on Rails, despite working primarily in PHP at the time GitLab CEO Sid Sijbrandij thinks his co-founder made a good choice: "It's worked out really well because the Ruby on Rails ecosystem allows you to shape a lot of functionality at a high quality," he explained. "If you look at…

And yet, when I think of gitlab I think of the insane resources it consumes and the slowness of the system even when you overprovision by a factor of 2 on cpu. Not saying I dislike gitlab, I actually really like it and we use the on-prem gold edition licensed to 6k seats. (as in, I put my money where my mouth is when I say I like it) But of the things people complain about regarding rails that's that it's: large, hea…

Ruby allows optimisations in C for critical parts. In that sense I'd pin gitlab issues less on the language or framework, and more on a lack of resource to cover the weaker points.

I say that having seen a ton of PHP code base that is not stellar in itself, but has the more critical parts well optimized, going through external C libraries or DB hooks on parts that really warrant it.

Re: Choosing Ruby on Rails for web development project in 2019

#40

Post by derefr »

faizshah wrote: post #31

Among my peers (undergrads in college) Rails has largely lost mindshare to python and Node (and even PHP!). At the 3 hackathons I went to this semester I could not find a single other person who knew Rails (so I always have to switch to node or python). If you take a look at devpost, Rails is increasingly losing popularity: https://devpost.com/software/built-with/ruby-on-rails My plea to the Rails community and Rails…

I’m surprised it’s Python/Node taking that mindshare. From my perspective (fintech industry), it looked like 100% of the decreasing usage of Rails by other fintech startups have been due to choosing Elixir’s Phoenix framework instead.
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