Yeah it’s nearly the main benefit of Ruby/Rails that you can spin up an mvp of your company in like a week, and have a decent feature set within a couple months.

The trap is when you start growing and it is hard to change. Because the features that took 1-2 months in RoR might take 3-4 months (or more!) to port to another language, and do you really want to stop your working business when it isn’t a problem?

Because Rails performs totally fine at small-mid startup scale. It’s only when you start getting a couple years old with lots of users that it starts to bite you. But at that point you already have gotten further than 90% of startups ever even make it. And at that point, honestly there are solutions for that too, like gradually pulling the poor-performing bits out into faster languages.

Writing this as someone who works for a startup that uses RoR, and I’ve seen it blow up over several years. I curse RoR daily because it pisses me off, but I don’t think this company would’ve gotten this far if it didn’t have the RoR speed at the beginning.

So are you better off starting your company on Go/Rust/Java? Maybe. But if getting to market fast will help you win, it’s hard to beat RoR.