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“Skylight is a smart profiler for Ruby on Rails applications.”

• kibwen 9y ago
  As a further historical note that may interest HN users specifically, Skylight was the world's first production user of Rust (the Ruby gem they ship is written in it), dating back to well before Rust was even stable.
  • atarian 9y ago
    Which is mainly because Yehuda Katz (Rust core member) works at Skylight.
    • steveklabnik 9y ago
      To be clear about the chronology here, wycats made the decision to go with Rust, then did a lot of work in Rust, then became a core team member. He chose Rust because of his needs in Skylight, not because he was already invested in Rust. https://blog.rust-lang.org/2014/12/12/Core-Team.html https://blog.rust-lang.org/2014/12/12/Core-Team.html > Yehuda Katz will be known to many in the Rust community for his work on the initial design and implementation of the Cargo project. He is also a co-founder of Tilde, which has been using Rust commercially in their Skylight product for quite some time
      • wycats 9y ago
        For slightly more context, I wrote the first lines of Rust code for Skylight as a spike at the end of 2013, and joined the Rust core team more than a year later. :) I was largely inspired by a blog post in June 2013 by Patrick Walton: Removing Garbage Collection From the Rust Language[1] [1]: http://pcwalton.github.io/blog/2013/06/02/removing-garbage-collection-from-the-rust-language/ http://pcwalton.github.io/blog/2013/06/02/removing-garbage-c...
        • igravious 9y ago
          Do you code in Ruby any more or is it all Rust these days? If you had to build a web app what would you use?
          • wycats 9y ago
            I split my time between Ruby, JavaScript (mostly with TypeScript) and Rust, with occasional Java and devops work. Of those, JavaScript (with TypeScript) is my predominant language at the moment, but the mix changes pretty often. Skylight's stack is Rust and Ruby for the agent, Rails for the backend, Java for our data processing pipeline (essentially a custom data store) and Ember for virtually the entire front end. The graphs in Skylight are Ember components written in d3. I still think that Rails is a great choice for most web apps, since (to this day) it provides an extremely productive baseline for building account management and working with third-party integrations, which turn out to be a surprising percentage of the total code (and an even higher percentage of backend code changes) in even an ambitious project like Skylight. I also think it's reasonable to use something like Java or Rust for any heavy data-crunching your app might do, but I think people over-estimate which aspects of their application are truly performance and efficiency critical.
            • igravious 9y ago
              Interesting. I see, thanks. From your list Ember stands out, was not expecting that. Rails and Ember integration looks painful? Maybe using Rails 5 and API mode is the way to go.
• Cyberdog 9y ago
  Darn, you beat me to it. Product blog operators, please see: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=16278142 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=16278142
  • username223 9y ago
    > Please put a global header on your blog that says "X is a Y that does Z." Product blog operators, please label your spam as spam. I presume this was posted by Godfrey Chan (http://www.tilde.io/about-us/ http://www.tilde.io/about-us/), an employee of wycats's company.
• wycats 9y ago
  For clarity, we also support almost all Rack-based frameworks in Ruby (including Sinatra): https://www.skylight.io/support/advanced-setup https://www.skylight.io/support/advanced-setup We should probably update our copy to clarify this point in the prominent places where it isn't already clear.
• dang 9y ago
  Ok we've attempted to integrate that into the title.