Live data from Hacker News

How to build a search engine with Ruby on Rails

blog.testdouble.com

61–65 of 65 posts

Re: How to build a search engine with Ruby on Rails

#61
post #41
post #6

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Rails hasn't had any interesting updates since version 4, and arguably introduced a few regressions IMHO (I'm looking at you, active storage and action cable) Ruby hasn't evolved much either. Rails only scales so far and then scaling gets really challenging, obviously the named companies have figured it out, but its not easy. For example, rails due to the high coupling between models and the database, rspec test get…

You don't know what you are talking about. Every Rails release from 4 adds a ton of new stuff, bug fixes to the framework. ActiveStorage is great addition - storing files on AWS now takes 30 minutes at most to setup. You don't need to use external gems for the same functionality now. Labeling it as a regression is nonsense as Rails before didn't have the functionality at all. Ruby also evolved a ton since Rails 4. Ju…

Arguably the most popular filetype stored with a rails app is images, but ActiveStorage didn't even support CDNs. 3rd party gems like CarrierWave supported CDNs do.

Instead of adding exactly what gems you need, rails forces you to jump through hoops to removed bloatware (ActiveText, ActiveCable, ActiveStorage).

Moving off of the rails asset pipeline to webpack was silly. If you're running a SPA, you should have a fully separated web-app and tooling stream instead of trying to merge your backend and frontends. For server side rendering, asset pipeline was good enough IMHO.

ActiveText doesn't even support CRDTs. Otherwise it doesn't really add much value to advanced text editor eco-systems.

The change logs are either adding bloatware that only Basecamp asked for, bug fixes, or security patches.

> And i think mentioning ML points in a direction that you don't know much about normal web development since for 99% of web things you don't need any ML at all.

This sounds like someone that has either only worked with webapps with very few users and not at big tech scale. You can get away with not using ML in b2b products with 5 customers, but at some point you will need to add ML to scale.

Re: How to build a search engine with Ruby on Rails

#62

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I'd argue even without them Ruby would be alive in the sense that the core language would get frequent updates. Even Perl is still alive https://github.com/Perl/perl5 , even in a healthier state than I would have thought.

Oh wow, Perl is still getting monthly updates - I knew it was on the decline but I thought the whole Perl 6/Perl 7/Perl 11 fragmentation had left things in a worse state.

I’ve heard of Raku (Perl 6), but didn’t realize there was a Perl 7 or Perl 11. Pretty interesting problem. In Java land you get Java 8, current Java, Groovy, Kotlin, etc. So Perl is in good company in this regard.

Re: How to build a search engine with Ruby on Rails

#63

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Oh wow, Perl is still getting monthly updates - I knew it was on the decline but I thought the whole Perl 6/Perl 7/Perl 11 fragmentation had left things in a worse state.

I’ve heard of Raku (Perl 6), but didn’t realize there was a Perl 7 or Perl 11. Pretty interesting problem. In Java land you get Java 8, current Java, Groovy, Kotlin, etc. So Perl is in good company in this regard.

Perl 11 was a thought experiment. It never actually became anything beyond a website expressing that notion. It got no traction from anybody apart of the originators. And of that I'm not really sure either.

Re: How to build a search engine with Ruby on Rails

#64
post #2

This is a bit off topic but I wanted to say I’m really glad there are still people out there hacking on some ruby + Postgres projects and writing about it. I feel that ruby is an excellent language and dread the demise of it.

How is it demised? Shopify, Stripe and many new YC startups use it.

Stripe does not use Rails. It uses Ruby for some backend services with its own custom ORM framework, logging etc.
Post reply on HN