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I've been very attracted to learn Ruby a couple of times, being exhausted of the JS ecosystem. Everybody who's used it seems to fall in love with it, but I can'

I've been very attracted to learn Ruby a couple of times, being exhausted of the JS ecosystem. Everybody who's used it seems to fall in love with it, but I can't get over just how slow it is... It takes a fresh installation of Discourse over 10 minutes to start-up again on a small underpowered VM and uses 10x as much RAM as an alternative platform such as Flarum.

freedomben 5y ago
I'm one of those people that fell in love with Ruby, and yeah the speed is the biggest downside. That said, a lot of the bulk is often Rails. I usually use Sinatra now and it's pretty light. On the smallest VM it usually starts quickly and runs fine for quite a while. One even survived an HN Hug. There are also some big improvements coming with Ruby 3 (if you aren't already upgraded to that) and more to come. But you definitely "pay" a fee in CPU/memory for the privilege of using Ruby. In most cases, it's way worth it IMHO. I've also been loving Elixir lately. It's got much the same feeling of beauty that Ruby does, and it's much lighter and lightning fast. I often measure response times in microseconds rather than milliseconds!
inopinatus 5y ago
My developer experience is that the long initial start time (of Rails in particular) is more than offset by my productivity.
- adriand 5y ago
  It’s funny, I’ve been writing Ruby code since Rails 1 and over the past few months I’ve been learning and using Node and Typescript and I find it incredibly productive compared to Rails. I get that Rails comes with a lot of great stuff out of the box, but the benefits of static typing for actually writing a lot of code are immense.
  - ta988 4y ago
    I've been doing ruby for the last year or so coming from statically typed languages and yes... 95% of our bugs in prod would not have happened if we had a good typing system.
jaredcwhite 5y ago
Expecting Discourse to give you an idea of a typical Ruby/Rails app will be very misleading. I've been working on Rails apps since 2008 and I've never had anything take more than ~10 *seconds* to boot up. For me, Ruby hasn't been slow for years. I work on both Rails and Node-based apps on a regular basis and the two are roughly comparable IMHO in terms of daily DX (perf-wise).

freedomben 5y ago

I'm one of those people that fell in love with Ruby, and yeah the speed is the biggest downside. That said, a lot of the bulk is often Rails. I usually use Sinatra now and it's pretty light. On the smallest VM it usually starts quickly and runs fine for quite a while. One even survived an HN Hug. There are also some big improvements coming with Ruby 3 (if you aren't already upgraded to that) and more to come. But you definitely "pay" a fee in CPU/memory for the privilege of using Ruby. In most cases, it's way worth it IMHO. I've also been loving Elixir lately. It's got much the same feeling of beauty that Ruby does, and it's much lighter and lightning fast. I often measure response times in microseconds rather than milliseconds!

inopinatus 5y ago

My developer experience is that the long initial start time (of Rails in particular) is more than offset by my productivity.

adriand 5y ago
It’s funny, I’ve been writing Ruby code since Rails 1 and over the past few months I’ve been learning and using Node and Typescript and I find it incredibly productive compared to Rails. I get that Rails comes with a lot of great stuff out of the box, but the benefits of static typing for actually writing a lot of code are immense.
- ta988 4y ago
  I've been doing ruby for the last year or so coming from statically typed languages and yes... 95% of our bugs in prod would not have happened if we had a good typing system.

jaredcwhite 5y ago

Expecting Discourse to give you an idea of a typical Ruby/Rails app will be very misleading. I've been working on Rails apps since 2008 and I've never had anything take more than ~10 *seconds* to boot up. For me, Ruby hasn't been slow for years. I work on both Rails and Node-based apps on a regular basis and the two are roughly comparable IMHO in terms of daily DX (perf-wise).