4 ms·

You can replace Rails with anything that's Turing complete right? We all know that. C, Assembly, Rust, anything can work. I just don't see WHY. If you're gonna

You can replace Rails with anything that's Turing complete right? We all know that. C, Assembly, Rust, anything can work. I just don't see WHY. If you're gonna say performance I'm gonna say who cares.

hugodutka 6y ago
John Carmack once did [0]. [0] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=21907517 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=21907517
pdpi 6y ago
Performance doesn't matter until it does. I've seen a malloc upgrade save millions of dollars.
- amadeuspagel 6y ago
  Once you have millions of dollars in hosting costs, you can rewrite your app in rust. Most likely, though, your app is never going to cost more then $5 per month.
  - mwcampbell 6y ago
    Another way of looking at it though is that by using a more efficient language and framework, you can grow farther on a single server, and that fundamentally simplifies things.
    - Isinlor 6y ago
      You should grow faster by focusing less on implementation and more on your core business competence. In old school PHP share-nothing architecture you can just throw more servers at it and call it a day until you need to start scaling databases.
      - couchand 6y ago
        But one misplaced comma and your whole site goes down.
  - adrianN 6y ago
    I think you underestimate the costs of rewriting an app that has millions of dollars of hosting costs.
  - throwaway894345 6y ago
    $5/month is a single teeny tiny EC2 instance (or if you’re on premise you can pretend that you’re saving money on hardware by ignoring maintenance costs). I think you’re exaggerating.
    - amadeuspagel 6y ago
      I'm not. Most projects are never going to see any significant traffic. In fact, most projects are never going to get finished and launched at all.
- joelbluminator 6y ago
  Depends what you're building I guess. Most Rails devs work on Cruddy / SAAS things like Basecamp where Rails is more than fine (or Django / PHP for that matter). If traffic is extreme caching can solve a lot of the problems. Also, companies like Shopify/Github open source and merge to Rails much of their scaling solutions, it's not as if you start from scratch.
Yoric 6y ago
The reason for which I want to build my web stuff on Rust is safety. There are so many things that can go wrong on a server (especially on a server under attack) that I want to at least trust my language and framework. Sadly, I have reached a stage at which there are very few languages I trust anymore to actually not explode in unpredictable manners when push comes to shove. Rust is one of them.
- joelbluminator 6y ago
  > there are very few languages I trust anymore to actually not explode in unpredictable manners Well, that's totally fine. To each his own. I push Ruby production code for 8 years now and I trust it.
  - Yoric 6y ago
    Absolutely, to each their own.
- Minor49er 6y ago
  You're going to hit a lot of other issues with a server before Rust's memory safety becomes a consideration. What's wrong with using Rails / Nginx behind a firewall?
  - Yoric 6y ago
    It's not just memory safety. I've had so many misadventures with JavaScript (and I'm part of the team that writes the Firefox JavaScript VM, so I'm supposed to know better) or Python, for instance, that the simple idea of maintaining an application written in either language brings me down. I fully realize that some people love these languages. I've written pretty sophisticated applications in these languages myself (including video games), and they're definitely great for exploring ideas. But at this stage of my career, for applications that matter to me, I value the time spent maintaining code more than the time spent writing it, and I find that the balance that works best for me is to use a strongly, statically-typed language such as Rust. YMMV
gameswithgo 6y ago
at work we care about web performance a lot, because we have a huge amount of traffic. so you could say anyone whobmanages a great deal of success may care about performance. yes you can scale wide but complexity and costs grow as you do. as well, there are plenty of non python/ruby web backends that offer way more performance without the productivity downsides of rust and c++
legulere 6y ago
Site speed has a pretty big impact on e.g. conversion rates.
jen20 6y ago
> If you're gonna say performance I'm gonna say who cares. Whoever pays the electricity bill?

hugodutka 6y ago

John Carmack once did [0]. [0] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=21907517 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=21907517

pdpi 6y ago

Performance doesn't matter until it does. I've seen a malloc upgrade save millions of dollars.

amadeuspagel 6y ago
Once you have millions of dollars in hosting costs, you can rewrite your app in rust. Most likely, though, your app is never going to cost more then $5 per month.
- mwcampbell 6y ago
  Another way of looking at it though is that by using a more efficient language and framework, you can grow farther on a single server, and that fundamentally simplifies things.
  - Isinlor 6y ago
    You should grow faster by focusing less on implementation and more on your core business competence. In old school PHP share-nothing architecture you can just throw more servers at it and call it a day until you need to start scaling databases.
    - couchand 6y ago
      But one misplaced comma and your whole site goes down.
- adrianN 6y ago
  I think you underestimate the costs of rewriting an app that has millions of dollars of hosting costs.
- throwaway894345 6y ago
  $5/month is a single teeny tiny EC2 instance (or if you’re on premise you can pretend that you’re saving money on hardware by ignoring maintenance costs). I think you’re exaggerating.
  - amadeuspagel 6y ago
    I'm not. Most projects are never going to see any significant traffic. In fact, most projects are never going to get finished and launched at all.
joelbluminator 6y ago
Depends what you're building I guess. Most Rails devs work on Cruddy / SAAS things like Basecamp where Rails is more than fine (or Django / PHP for that matter). If traffic is extreme caching can solve a lot of the problems. Also, companies like Shopify/Github open source and merge to Rails much of their scaling solutions, it's not as if you start from scratch.

Yoric 6y ago

The reason for which I want to build my web stuff on Rust is safety. There are so many things that can go wrong on a server (especially on a server under attack) that I want to at least trust my language and framework. Sadly, I have reached a stage at which there are very few languages I trust anymore to actually not explode in unpredictable manners when push comes to shove. Rust is one of them.

joelbluminator 6y ago
> there are very few languages I trust anymore to actually not explode in unpredictable manners Well, that's totally fine. To each his own. I push Ruby production code for 8 years now and I trust it.
- Yoric 6y ago
  Absolutely, to each their own.
Minor49er 6y ago
You're going to hit a lot of other issues with a server before Rust's memory safety becomes a consideration. What's wrong with using Rails / Nginx behind a firewall?
- Yoric 6y ago
  It's not just memory safety. I've had so many misadventures with JavaScript (and I'm part of the team that writes the Firefox JavaScript VM, so I'm supposed to know better) or Python, for instance, that the simple idea of maintaining an application written in either language brings me down. I fully realize that some people love these languages. I've written pretty sophisticated applications in these languages myself (including video games), and they're definitely great for exploring ideas. But at this stage of my career, for applications that matter to me, I value the time spent maintaining code more than the time spent writing it, and I find that the balance that works best for me is to use a strongly, statically-typed language such as Rust. YMMV

gameswithgo 6y ago

at work we care about web performance a lot, because we have a huge amount of traffic. so you could say anyone whobmanages a great deal of success may care about performance. yes you can scale wide but complexity and costs grow as you do. as well, there are plenty of non python/ruby web backends that offer way more performance without the productivity downsides of rust and c++

legulere 6y ago

Site speed has a pretty big impact on e.g. conversion rates.

jen20 6y ago

> If you're gonna say performance I'm gonna say who cares. Whoever pays the electricity bill?