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Ruby on Rails is the world’s fastest web framework for startups

Kevin Gilpin on February 11, 2021

I’m a 48 year old developer and entrepreneur. I’ve developed professionally in C++, Java, Python, C#, Ruby, Go, and JavaScript. My current startup ...
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Abhinay Kumar

Do you ever reflect on your negative comments? Someone is taking an effort to make us understand that productivity is the kind of speed that devs should care about period.

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drew

I find it particularly interesting that the critics of rails leave off basecamp, hey, and many other big pieces of software that are powered by ruby and are doing just fine. Granted I don't know how large their user base is, but I do recall seeing DHH tweet about rails being able to at least power a $100m company(basecamp) and now an email service. Im guessing rails is plenty fast enough for those.

Thanks for a great article. I'm new to rails (a couple of months in) and I'm enjoying every minute of it.

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Gabriel Mazetto • Edited

The "machine" cost is no where near the "human cost". Unless you have a very specific case (to which you should optimize), there is no need to rewrite anything in X. Hiring additional people that knows X will eclipse whatever you are going to save by using fewer machines.

At the end of the day, the bigger bottlenecks are Databases and disk I/O.

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Ron

Uhmm my understanding of the article is that you use Rails to get you started, but then you optimise.
I've taken that path myself, started with Rails and as demand grew we slowly spread into microservices across different languages. Twitter, Github, etc all did that.

Nobody is saying you stick with Rails forever. Some companies maybe don't even make it that far to reach performance issues that require badass infrastructures.

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Ian bradbury

@ron - I think GitHub is ROR.

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Ron

The GitHub site is still RoR but many of the services behind are not anymore. That's the sort of hybrid approach I'm taking about

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Haruan Justino

Those are almost the same reasons that I use Django with Python, I will save the article to read again in the future, quite nice things to remember.

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rachelle palmer • Edited

There's also just the bitter reality that most of us will never build a site that has the volume of traffic and users of Github, Airbnb, etc (who, incidentally do use Ruby). So the point about performance is probably not relevant for the majority or even almost all developers who build ruby apps in the first place.
What I see happening typically is that when the Ruby application does hit that magical hypergrowth period, developers/the company has a lot of pain, and then rewrite some of the application in Go. Not all of it, not half of it, not even 10% of it, just the parts that need to be super performant.
That doesn't negate all the benefits that using Ruby provides, imo.

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Toma • Edited

The speed of coding/bug fixing depends on the skills, experience with the programming tools - of the coders /and their attachment to technical perfection from machine viewpoint/. Besides that note, I totally agree with you. Speed of development is more valuable than of execution.

 
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Kevin Gilpin

When you achieve MVP you don’t get paid. You get to borrow more money (from VCs usually), which you can use to try and scale up your embryonic company. Meanwhile everyone is trying to kill you.

 
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Ian bradbury

Where did 100 come from?

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peerreynders • Edited

Benefits of Elixir: How Elixir helped Bleacher Report handle 8x more traffic:

"On our monolith we needed roughly 150 [Rails] servers to power the more intensive portions of BR. Following our move to Elixir we're now able to power those same functions on five servers and we're probably overprovisioned. We could probably get away with it on two," Marks says.

Then again Phoenix/Elixir/Erlang are a special kind of beast.

That's 'Billion' with a 'B': Scaling to the Next Level at WhatsApp
Why We Chose Erlang over Java, Scala, Go, C

Which companies are using Erlang, and why?:

Once upon a time, Cisco, Ericsson, Klarna, Goldman Sachs, T-Mobile, WhatsApp, Amazon and many other top companies kept a secret. Erlang was that badly kept secret.

Robert Virding:

Well then, just more cases where it's in wide use but you don't see it or know about it. It's really great it's being used but a bit depressing that no one knows about it as you continually hear "what's Erlang, why should I learn/use it as no one uses it?"

Second-Order Effects: Energy Hogs: Can World’s Huge Data Centers Be Made More Efficient?

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Cliff Hazelton

Curious about this - how often is language the bottleneck (and the cost driver) vs. database and just a poorly optimized codebase (N+1 queries, bad SQL, etc.)? What have you measured?

 
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Eric-Guo

I can programming C# and Ruby, I think I wouldn't consider C# jobs even a little bit higher paid. Using Rails is really peasure.

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Antonio Azuara

I think Ruby and Ruby On Rails should be compared against low code or no code solutions (because the amount of abstraction that it's there) not against super scalable functional programming languages like Elixir. And speaking about the resource hungriness of Ruby, when your product reaches market and hopefully financial success the costs of the cloud bill won't be a problem.

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Sergey Kislyakov

@ben , could you provide some light on that point? Dev.to uses Ruby and I think it's a pretty high-loaded website.

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Kit Sunde

It's possible to be incompetent in any language. English for instance.

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Andy Maleh

Brilliant article! Thanks!

Godspeed.

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Sujit Mohanty • Edited

Great article! Thank you!

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Lee

Is there a story behind this?

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muzammilaalpha

Good post!

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JoshuaWoods

I gave up trying to learn how to use Rails when I could make heads around of just using the frame work. But I use Middleman

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prashant rana

is there any benchmark that confirms the articles, techempower.com/benchmarks/#sectio... according to this ROR is no where near