4 ms·

How many developers will really need it though? It's fast enough for Stripe's API, it's fast enough for Shopify; hardware in exchange for productivity is a pre

• likeabbas 4y ago
  Stripe’s API is one of the slowest of any payment processor, and it’s a major source of contention within the company
• favorited 4y ago
  Except most companies won't attract the same top-tier Ruby/Rails talent. For example, it looks like 1/3 of the current Rails Core Team work at Shopify, including the person who is the #1 all-time Rails contributor.
  • JohnBooty 4y ago
    I may be misunderstanding you, but can you elaborate on why you believe you need "top-tier" Ruby/Rails talent to run a performant Rails application? In my experience, you need no more than mid-level talent. You need a certain % of people who are strong at working with databases to ensure good (normalized, indexed, etc) database design. You also need a certain level of organizational will to avoid letting a Rails monolith get absolutely out of control, but this is less "a need for top-level talent" and more "just stick to boring old Ruby/Rails best practices." Those are, of course, things you need when working with any stack. I don't find them to be Ruby/Rails specific.
  • byroot 4y ago
    Rails Core team member working at Shopify here. You seem to be misinterpreting what we’re doing at Shopify. We pretty much never work on the product or anything like that, and we don’t go around the app chasing perf issues either. At best we work on the infra or dev tools to encourage or enforce better patterns, or sometimes in some kind of support capacity for teams having Ruby or Rails specific issues, but Shopify would do fine without us. We’re mostly here to ensure Rails and the Ruby ecosystem Shopify heavily depends on is maintained and healthy. Now maybe you need to tier talent to scale a Rails infra (I don’t think so), but Shopify’s presence in the Rails or Ruby core teams is no indication of that.
• clintonb 4y ago
  > It's fast enough for Stripe's API... Stripe is moving to Java.
  • Mikeb85 4y ago
    Every large enough organisation eventually moves to Java (or C++, or Rust). When you have more bodies than things to do you just optimize... But how did all these startups get so big?
  • JohnBooty 4y ago
    If you need maximum requests per second for sufficiently high volumes of traffic - ie, Stripe/Twitter/FB/whatever stuff - then yeah Ruby/Python/etc doesn't cut it. If your needs get extreme enough (high frequency trading?) then Java doesn't cut it either. Most (I suspect > 99%) use cases don't fit these criteria. I know this is skewed a perception is skewed a little by the HN crowd, where many folks legitimately are trying to build the next Stripe or Twitter, but I think the world of modern software development is somewhat poisoned by this belief that we all need to follow FAANG-scale practices and architectures.
    • kaba0 4y ago
      Java is used in HFT, and for the variant where it is not fast enough, general purpose CPUs are not fast enough so not even hand-written assembly can compete anymore. They use FPGAs for that kind.
      • likeabbas 4y ago
        Java is used in HFT for markets that have a time window, but only because they tune the GC to never kick in during market hours
• drogus 4y ago
  Both Stripe and Shopify have more resources than an average small startup