Ruby is fast enough and it's a beautiful language with a few warts, just like any language. Profiling and caching should be the first step to solving an existi

Ruby is fast enough and it's a beautiful language with a few warts, just like any language. Profiling and caching should be the first step to solving an existing app's problems. Rails is a great framework because it gives developers rules, a simple pattern to follow. All that being said, if I was starting an app today I wouldn't choose Rails or even Ruby. There are plenty of other options that are almost as expressive and easy to hire for without the speed penalty. If you hire good developers they can get up to speed on any language and any framework. If you don't hire good developers then you're paying a 2x-10x penalty for hiring bad developers and a slower language or framework. Who here hasn't ever worked with or hired a bad developer? IO is the true bottleneck in most situations but so is a developer writing a view that queries the database for a list of things and then filters them in code instead of letting the database do it. I can't count on two hands the number of times I've seen a developer do this in the past 6 mo. Your framework and your language are your platform. If you're stuck on a platform, accept it. Rewrites are hard. Hard for the business, hard for your users, hard for your developers. If you're starting from scratch do yourself a favor and pick something that doesn't chop you off at the knees to begin with. Bad code in (Go, elixir, c#, python) is faster than bad code in Ruby. [edit] english