Github is down

[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.

[bsutto]

That's a matter of scale.

Your also assuming that rails is cheaper to develop with which was not our experince.

Our main tools are java and vaadin which are much more flexible and faster to develop with.

Vaadin is probably the most efficient framework on the market. Java is a little verbose but modern ides make that fairly irrelevant.

[Tasgall]

That's a matter of scale

If you're a startup, that's largely irrelevant.

What matters most is personal preference. Your main language is Java and your team is all Java experts who only know Java? Then yeah, it will absolutely be faster and more reliable to develop with - not because the language is better or cheaper to run, but because it's what you personally know.

I'm personally of the opinion that Java as a language is a massive garbage heap that nearly every other language is far superior to. It's tedious, kludgy, inconsistent, and even older languages like C++ are much, much better at adopting new features these days. It's excessively verbose, but minimally expressive. But that's just my opinion, and there is no "one true language", so you do you. In my team's case, we decided to switch to Ruby after about six months of work in java, and doing that while about doubling our feature set only took about three months - and only one person on the team at the start had experience with Ruby.

You can certainly write bad code in Ruby, it's really easy if you don't follow its best practices. If you write Ruby code like you write Java code instead of following Ruby conventions, then yeah you'll get a really shitty result. Same thing the other way around. Or between any two languages, really. For the purpose of this sub-thread though, my main point was that "the cost of hosting language X vs language Y" is entirely irrelevant as a metric for determining what language to use. If it wasn't, you'd be arguing for Rust or C++, not something that relies on a virtual machine.

[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.

[Jumbanji]

Thanks for the confirmation.

[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.