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Right, but a big project in Rails has all the problems you can think of: - slow to compile and run - easy target for spaghetti code - test suites get sluggis

Right, but a big project in Rails has all the problems you can think of: - slow to compile and run - easy target for spaghetti code - test suites get sluggish - hard to upgrade - won't scale well - with no static typing, large scale collaboration can easily break things - metaprogramming hell

jaredcwhite 5y ago
A big project in any stack has many problems. Vanilla Rails is going to scale way better than some wacky bespoke configuration of stitched-together NPM packages, which in my experience is what a lot of folks build now because they don't know any better.
- princevegeta89 5y ago
  I've successfully run Java/Go projects with huge amounts of code without a lot of degradation in any direction whereas Rails seems to quickly come to a stopping point compared to other platforms. I've written my side project which is now at a huge size in Elixir, I'm yet to see any degradation so far. I'm sure Rails would have been a pain by now. Sorry I don't have much Node experience so can't comment.
  - jaredcwhite 5y ago
    Simply hasn't been my experience at all, and I've worked with numerous Rails projects large and small since 2008. If you prefer Java/Go/Elixir, knock yourself out, but I'm throughly satisfied with Ruby-based solutions.
    - princevegeta89 5y ago
      Got it. It's not impossible but I've been at multiple jobs involving Rails monolithic apps, they all really sucked from a maintenance and development perspective. P.S would have been happier if you had a better choice of words than "knocking myself out".
      - mountainriver 5y ago
        Yes, I’m at one of those companies now, spaghetti code galore, and the project is becoming increasingly harder to maintain. As the company scales they really need to break things into more services to distribute work and satiate work happening in other languages, but now that’s nearly impossible because of the mess they’ve created Rails is great if your building a basic “dumb” web app, but rails folks seem to think it’s more than that and need to get their heads out of the clouds
        jaredcwhite 5y ago
        I've worked on a lot of legacy Rails apps. Most of the problems of "spaghetti code" occur because people write bucketloads of un-Ruby-like code that betrays a serious lack of understanding around how Rails really works. Whenever I hear "aw man, Rails sucks. I switched to writing (X) in Rust/Go/Haskell/TypeScript/whatever…" Let me stop you right there. If you tell me Rails wasn't meeting your needs so you rewrote (X) in a different manner using Ruby + something else, I'd totally understand. Otherwise, all it tells me is that there was a tragic lack of deep Ruby knowledge, respect even, to begin with as the project unfolded. Often I muse on how in some ways it was unfortunate that Rails became such a darling in the startup community early on. It meant that a ton of people jumped into Rails web dev thinking they were writing "Rails". No, you're writing Ruby, and Rails just provides a nice set of base classes and some decent defaults and assumptions. If you end up with a giant wad of spaghetti mess, that's on you. It's totally feasible not to end up there, and plenty of projects end up in far better shape.
k__ 5y ago
Somehow Rails seemed to me like a short fad. I knew a few people at university, who were pretty hyped about it. That was in 2008, I think. They used it at some companies where they jobbed and found it too limiting. I was building customized stuff with bare PHP in those days and found it quite flexible. Later, the Rails hype came to PHP, but I already left for Node.js and never looked back.
- dwheeler 5y ago
  GitHub and GitLab use Rails. Many UK government websites do. Like anything else, Rails is good for some things & terrible at others. Rails tries to minimize developer time, at the cost of computing time (Ruby is not a fast language), and focuses on CRUD-type applications. Whether or not that's a good match depends on what you're trying to do.
  - k__ 5y ago
    Somehow Rails-like frameworks didn't make it big on Node.js, which was released way later than Ruby. I saw this as a sign that the time of these fully fledged frameworks was over and devs were craving modularity. But, yes, I saw a bunch of recent projects done with Rails. Forem is built with it, for example.
ericb 5y ago
> won't scale well Really? https://twitter.com/ShopifyEng/status/1465806691543531525 https://twitter.com/ShopifyEng/status/1465806691543531525 Github is in Rails. I mean, seems like it scales just fine.
- princevegeta89 5y ago
  It takes a lot more effort and housekeeping in Rails to make it scale well. When Github was built, Rails didn't have many decent alternatives. As of today there are a good number
  - montblanc 5y ago
    > It takes a lot more effort and housekeeping in Rails to make it scale well. It takes increasing the number of pods on your k8s which is how almost all teams deploy nowadays. Bigger amazon bills yes but the devops overhead isn't really larger in Rails,

jaredcwhite 5y ago

A big project in any stack has many problems. Vanilla Rails is going to scale way better than some wacky bespoke configuration of stitched-together NPM packages, which in my experience is what a lot of folks build now because they don't know any better.

princevegeta89 5y ago
I've successfully run Java/Go projects with huge amounts of code without a lot of degradation in any direction whereas Rails seems to quickly come to a stopping point compared to other platforms. I've written my side project which is now at a huge size in Elixir, I'm yet to see any degradation so far. I'm sure Rails would have been a pain by now. Sorry I don't have much Node experience so can't comment.
- jaredcwhite 5y ago
  Simply hasn't been my experience at all, and I've worked with numerous Rails projects large and small since 2008. If you prefer Java/Go/Elixir, knock yourself out, but I'm throughly satisfied with Ruby-based solutions.
  - princevegeta89 5y ago
    Got it. It's not impossible but I've been at multiple jobs involving Rails monolithic apps, they all really sucked from a maintenance and development perspective. P.S would have been happier if you had a better choice of words than "knocking myself out".
    - mountainriver 5y ago
      Yes, I’m at one of those companies now, spaghetti code galore, and the project is becoming increasingly harder to maintain. As the company scales they really need to break things into more services to distribute work and satiate work happening in other languages, but now that’s nearly impossible because of the mess they’ve created Rails is great if your building a basic “dumb” web app, but rails folks seem to think it’s more than that and need to get their heads out of the clouds
      - jaredcwhite 5y ago
        I've worked on a lot of legacy Rails apps. Most of the problems of "spaghetti code" occur because people write bucketloads of un-Ruby-like code that betrays a serious lack of understanding around how Rails really works. Whenever I hear "aw man, Rails sucks. I switched to writing (X) in Rust/Go/Haskell/TypeScript/whatever…" Let me stop you right there. If you tell me Rails wasn't meeting your needs so you rewrote (X) in a different manner using Ruby + something else, I'd totally understand. Otherwise, all it tells me is that there was a tragic lack of deep Ruby knowledge, respect even, to begin with as the project unfolded. Often I muse on how in some ways it was unfortunate that Rails became such a darling in the startup community early on. It meant that a ton of people jumped into Rails web dev thinking they were writing "Rails". No, you're writing Ruby, and Rails just provides a nice set of base classes and some decent defaults and assumptions. If you end up with a giant wad of spaghetti mess, that's on you. It's totally feasible not to end up there, and plenty of projects end up in far better shape.

k__ 5y ago

Somehow Rails seemed to me like a short fad. I knew a few people at university, who were pretty hyped about it. That was in 2008, I think. They used it at some companies where they jobbed and found it too limiting. I was building customized stuff with bare PHP in those days and found it quite flexible. Later, the Rails hype came to PHP, but I already left for Node.js and never looked back.

dwheeler 5y ago
GitHub and GitLab use Rails. Many UK government websites do. Like anything else, Rails is good for some things & terrible at others. Rails tries to minimize developer time, at the cost of computing time (Ruby is not a fast language), and focuses on CRUD-type applications. Whether or not that's a good match depends on what you're trying to do.
- k__ 5y ago
  Somehow Rails-like frameworks didn't make it big on Node.js, which was released way later than Ruby. I saw this as a sign that the time of these fully fledged frameworks was over and devs were craving modularity. But, yes, I saw a bunch of recent projects done with Rails. Forem is built with it, for example.

ericb 5y ago

> won't scale well Really? https://twitter.com/ShopifyEng/status/1465806691543531525 https://twitter.com/ShopifyEng/status/1465806691543531525 Github is in Rails. I mean, seems like it scales just fine.

princevegeta89 5y ago
It takes a lot more effort and housekeeping in Rails to make it scale well. When Github was built, Rails didn't have many decent alternatives. As of today there are a good number
- montblanc 5y ago
  > It takes a lot more effort and housekeeping in Rails to make it scale well. It takes increasing the number of pods on your k8s which is how almost all teams deploy nowadays. Bigger amazon bills yes but the devops overhead isn't really larger in Rails,