GP’s sarcastic “rails doesn’t scale” implies that it would also be a great choice for people starting afresh in 2023. The reply asks for a comparison with other languages popular in 2023, especially ones that are known for being more performant (lower memory and CPU consumption, lower latency).
And that’s when you’re dragging the conversation back to 2006. It’s not 2006 anymore.
If you're Github or Shopify and can throw (waste?) engineering years at solving a framework specific ecosystem nightmare problems, and have the klout and runway to hire core Ruby and Rails maintainers, then you're probably in a highly unique situation and could use any framework you want.
The rest of us don't see Rails as a great choice for Github. Doubt and questioning.
[1] https://videos.itrevolution.com/watch/550704376/ [2] https://youtu.be/GfhPeOiXDLA?t=725
That's a weird way of framing it.
They stuck with a fork of Rails 2.3 for a long time because the upgrade was deemed too costly, not because their fork was faster.
In the end their performance patches were either outdated or contributed upstream, and they are now on Rails main branch.
And while it was a fork, it was still largely "Rails".
> We forked rails and _practically wrote our own._ We fought against the framework. We deviated from the framework, and we even wondered if rails was right for us at all.
and
> Rails 3 was found to be five times slower than Rails 2
I regularly talk with engineers that worked on that project at GitHub, some are now my coworkers. I know more about this effort than what was said publicly.
> Rails 3 was found to be five times slower than Rails 2
This is a bogus claim. It might have been 5 times slower on some pathological cases, it absolutely wasn't 5 times slower overall.
But one thing we can’t measure - how many candidates chose to join Shopify and GitHub because they were keen to work on Ruby? Java had a reputation for being boring, while Ruby was fun and exciting. Their success was possibly tied to this, but we’ll never know for sure.
In 2023 the calculus of what language to choose is different. But these companies are just glad they succeeded while others didn’t.
Ruby is still a great way to start it up. Consider that in 2006-2008, it's deployment story was horrible. Since then, the ruby ecosystem bootstrapped lockfiles, 12 factor app manifesto, and a lot of the conventions we all take for granted nowadays. And while there are certainly enough arguments to bikeshed on, its still a rock solid ecosystem.
