I agree ruby is slow and it lost the race with javascript. And the lack of a corporate sponsor has a lot to do with this. At GitLab the company we think that ha

I agree ruby is slow and it lost the race with javascript. And the lack of a corporate sponsor has a lot to do with this. At GitLab the company we think that having a company behind an open source project is a plus (although the OP was talking about a user such as Twitter instead of Ruby Inc.). We hope to do our part in helping ruby become faster, our new hire Yorick will spend 20% of his time on Rubinius http://yorickpeterse.com/articles/hello-gitlab/ http://yorickpeterse.com/articles/hello-gitlab/ Although Rails is stagnating as far as I know the library ecosystem is superior to that of others. Sure, there are more npm packages than gems. But I bet that the total complexity that Rails gems tackle is higher than what is available for Meteor. GitLab has close to 1000 non-unique dependencies https://gitlab.com/gitlab-org/gitlab-ce/blob/master/Gemfile.lock https://gitlab.com/gitlab-org/gitlab-ce/blob/master/Gemfile.... I don't think that anything in the javascript world compares. But please show me I'm wrong, I love to learn. I think that in a few years the situation might be different. Personally I hope that Elixir and Phoenix will replace Ruby and Rails. But maybe it will be Meteor or another js framework (Sails?). But I would optimize for the next few years and build my next startup on Rails. As indicated by the OP, a rewrite can happen even when you bet on javascript.