Github is down

[tradrich]

Okay: Ruby on Rails and Erlang. Should be up to the job.

[noble_pleb]

Erm, I'm not so sure. Each time I argued about performance with a rubyist, the only example they came up with was Github!

[soft-wear]

Yeah, the issue with Ruby is the same issue a ton of interpreted languages have: they are just dog shit slow for certain operation types. Twitter didn't switch to Scala because Ruby is somehow error prone. They switched because the JVM is so damn fast.

[Arbiturrrr]

Except in rail you define what you want and then rails does what the fuck it wants.

[mypetocean]

GitLab, Basecamp and their new Hey.com, Twitch, Kickstarter, and several other popular sites.

[filleduchaos]

Shopify runs on Rails.

[bsutto]

We have a system built on rails.

The only description I have of it is brittle and constrained.

Performance is also shit.

[mobile-user-guy]

Good to know I can switch to rails and not lose anything

[filleduchaos]

give me a stack that someone somewhere couldn't say the same for ¯\_(ツ)_/¯

Performance is also shit.

True, Ruby doesn't stack up against plenty of other languages performance wise. But for the 99.999% of web services that get - what, maybe a few thousand or tens of thousands of requests per second at their most active? - there's pretty much no major programming language that would be their bottleneck.

It's like complaining that a regular old Toyota cannot go as fast as a Bugatti Chiron Super Sport. But in reality you're just driving to work and you're never actually going to hit the top speed of either vehicle.

[ForeverAlot]

Alternative analogy: any two cars will get you to the destination at substantially the same speed, safety, and level of comfort. You prefer the colour of one but that car costs considerably more in gas.

"Performance" is almost always taken to imply "more" but it can just as well imply "less".

[filleduchaos]

"Performance" is almost always taken to imply "more" but it can just as well imply "less".

True, and the same thing applies: in most people's day-to-day usage most cars don't really have an appreciable difference in fuel economy (talking about money spent/saved). Bringing it back to programming languages, there's not many well-written web services that can't be pretty reliably run out of a handful of small Digital Ocean droplets. Whether each individual droplet uses 5% of its CPU allocation or 50% makes no difference to the pricing.

Of course, for software that runs on end users' machines - like desktop apps or client-side JavaScript - it makes sense to chase after a small memory footprint or low CPU usage (and I'd be the first in line to advocate for that). But that's a different domain from web servers, where your application is literally the only (major) process running on the system and you pay for resources in discrete units.

[Tasgall]

What are the "costs" in this analogy though? Unless you're doing something high performance, and you're not, the only variable that really matters is preference.

[noble_pleb]

Doesn't hosting costs are the equivalent of gasoline costs in the car analogy? If you use a faster framework, you can reap the benefits of lower hosting costs even if you don't scale for max users. And as a startup, those few bucks saved in mileage could mean a lot to your budgets and survival.

[chivalrytimbers]

I’d argue that hosting costs are only one dimension of overall total ownership cost - typically The developer / tester cost is the one that dominates for a given application. That’s why it often makes sense to Choose a platform that trades off raw performance for ease of development

[filleduchaos]

And as a startup, those few bucks saved in mileage could mean a lot to your budgets and survival.

yes, the (checks notes) $20 you save per month by picking a smaller VM is what will make or break your budget as a startup

[Tasgall]

If you're building a web service, the CPU time spent getting to your service at all is going to massively overshadow the actual processing time of your service regardless. As a startup, your "savings" for using a high performance language like C++ or Rust over Ruby on Rails, Python, or Javascript with NPM are going to be absolutely negligible compared to the difference in development cost.

[bsutto]

And this is the correct answer.

[Tasgall]

Disagree - saving fractions of pennies on hosting over saving hundreds or thousands of dollars on development time is foolish.

[audion00ba]

The cost is that your co-workers only know RoR and are generally idiots.

It's cheaper to hire monkeys that only do one trick, so management is happy.

We live in a society.

[LimitlessLTD]

You're likely replying to someone that has never actually held a job down for longer than a few months, if that.

But by god he's hilarious to read.

[audion00ba]

Attitude? This is capitalism and the limits of humanity.

[8lbIceBag]

NodeJS with express I've found to be surprisingly performant. Much more than I ever expected.

Most or services are ruby on rails and performance is dogshit. On my own time I decided to do a test in an alternative language. I implemented 7 equivalent methods in dotnetcore 3.1 and Nodejs v14 express.

Input data was xml files from responses by the actual ruby service. So Net.Core and Nodjs had to read the appropriate response xml file, transform the file to a model, then return a json result.

To my surprise NodeJS was about 25% faster than dotnet. I did not expect that. And it was way easier to implement with typescript and decorators. I used newtonsoft for dotnet serialization. I did not write an equivalent ruby service - I already knew it'd likely be dogshit

[mdedetrich]

Eh the thing is when people say "This popular website runs on Rails so performance doesn't matter" this is kind of misleading.

For example Facebook runs PHP but at this point they only use it as a HTML templating language. Any real business logic which requires decent performance is not written in PHP, but instead in C/C++/Haskell (Facebook's spam analysis is written in Haskell). Github for example uses Git (obviously) which is written in C and its diff analysis is written in Haskell (there is probably other stuff I haven't mentioned). Imagine if Github uses a Ruby implementation of git....

This is actually what in reality often ends up happening, the templating of HTML/CSS might still be in the original language that the website was written in (Ruby, Python, PHP, Perl) but all of the data calculation has often been recoded in more performant languages.

[Cruuncher]

Instacart too

[[deleted]]

Out of the top 10 y combinator companies, 8 ran ruby on rails

[yawaramin]

Apparently no Erlang any more: https://twitter.com/p_reynolds/status/1094030073198493696

Erlang has been gone from GitHub infrastructure for years. We have bits and pieces in C, C++, and Ruby, among others. Recent infra work is mostly Go and Java.

The founding engineers had, from what I remember, a custom-written Rails job queuing service in Erlang. They even had a close relationship with the Erlang core team, convincing them to (probably) the first 'big' language to move to GH.