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Are people using Rails for new startups? It feels like I haven't heard anything new about Rails for the past five years, but suddenly in the last few weeks it'

Are people using Rails for new startups? It feels like I haven't heard anything new about Rails for the past five years, but suddenly in the last few weeks it's been a trending topic on HN.

chikere232 2y ago
People have forgotten how horribly it failed last time
- Alifatisk 2y ago
  What happened then?
  - pawelduda 2y ago
    Probably referring to twitter switching from Rails a long time ago, because it didn't scale for them. I can't think of anything else
  - boesboes 2y ago
    Nothing, probably just not a fan…
Lio 2y ago
Yeah seems like it. I’m still working with startups using Rails. The changes coming with Rails 8 are really good for small teams working to tight budgets. The new deployment strategy is amazing compared to some of the complex react, micro services, k8s and cloud stacks I’ve worked with. They always involve a lot of engineering effort and a lot of expensive proprietary services. If you want to get off the ground quick for little money a Rails monolith with the frontend using Hotwire still looks very hard to beat. If Shopify, GitHub, etc can scale to be the largest vendors in their respective markets you know you can too.
earthnail 2y ago
I’ve been using Rails for tape.it to power cloud syncing for an app. Upsides: hilariously easy deployment and development story. Migrations and secrets management is trivial. Everything works. No long searches for third party dependencies. Downsides: speed (as in compared to a Java backend, for example), and activerecord has a learning curve on performance. Did some bad design decisions on two endpoints that my iOS client depends on and those design decisions hurt badly. They would’ve hurt in any language but hit me much much sooner with Rails.
- deleted 2y ago
  [deleted]
Alifatisk 2y ago
Something with Rails 8 sparked a renaissance, it's gotten some attraction for new users again.
- pawelduda 2y ago
  Source?
  - Alifatisk 2y ago
    I have no direct source, that's just what I have noticed from reading blogs about switching to Rails and by people on Twitter embracing the new release. I've also noticed the engagement in posts regarding Rails has increased and been reading comments by users who've never tried Rails giving it a shot and found it pleasant to work with.
  - bluerooibos 2y ago
    Having been in the Rails community for seven years or so, I can say that there's been a lot more excitement and activity after Rails 7 (Hotwire stack). It doesn't seem that long ago, but we're already on Rails 8, which is now bringing a new round of excitement of its own. I've seen a ton of different "we're switching to Rails" posts floating around like these - * https://www.reddit.com/r/rails/comments/1dkcegr/im_switching_from_laravel_to_rails/ https://www.reddit.com/r/rails/comments/1dkcegr/im_switching... * https://www.reddit.com/r/rails/comments/1ah1b36/is_the_rails_revival_happening_right_now/ https://www.reddit.com/r/rails/comments/1ah1b36/is_the_rails... There's also the new Rails Foundation - https://rubyonrails.org/foundation https://rubyonrails.org/foundation and their new annual conference, Rails World, which has proved pretty popular - https://www.reddit.com/r/rails/comments/1fqizim/rails_world_2024_opening_keynote_david_heinemeier/ https://www.reddit.com/r/rails/comments/1fqizim/rails_world_... So, Rails ain't dead yet :)
    - pawelduda 2y ago
      Nice, happy to see that
  - nop_slide 2y ago
Tainnor 2y ago
As with any technology, there are its supporters and its detractors. I would say that it's popularity has definitely waned in the last 10-15 years, probably in part due to Javascript gaining more ground, perceived performance problems with Ruby and the fact that many frameworks in other languages adopted some of Rails's best features (such as convention over configuration, DB migrations, unified project structures, etc.) and ignored its worst parts (such as monkeypatching).
olegp 2y ago
We're using it for https://www.freeats.com/ https://www.freeats.com/, an open source applicant tracking system we just launched. You can check out the source here: https://github.com/freeats/freeats https://github.com/freeats/freeats

Are people using Rails for new startups? It feels like I haven't heard anything new about Rails for the past five years, but suddenly in the last few weeks it's been a trending topic on HN.

chikere232 2y ago

People have forgotten how horribly it failed last time

Alifatisk 2y ago
What happened then?
- pawelduda 2y ago
  Probably referring to twitter switching from Rails a long time ago, because it didn't scale for them. I can't think of anything else
- boesboes 2y ago
  Nothing, probably just not a fan…

Lio 2y ago

Yeah seems like it. I’m still working with startups using Rails. The changes coming with Rails 8 are really good for small teams working to tight budgets. The new deployment strategy is amazing compared to some of the complex react, micro services, k8s and cloud stacks I’ve worked with. They always involve a lot of engineering effort and a lot of expensive proprietary services. If you want to get off the ground quick for little money a Rails monolith with the frontend using Hotwire still looks very hard to beat. If Shopify, GitHub, etc can scale to be the largest vendors in their respective markets you know you can too.

earthnail 2y ago

I’ve been using Rails for tape.it to power cloud syncing for an app. Upsides: hilariously easy deployment and development story. Migrations and secrets management is trivial. Everything works. No long searches for third party dependencies. Downsides: speed (as in compared to a Java backend, for example), and activerecord has a learning curve on performance. Did some bad design decisions on two endpoints that my iOS client depends on and those design decisions hurt badly. They would’ve hurt in any language but hit me much much sooner with Rails.

deleted 2y ago
[deleted]

Alifatisk 2y ago

Something with Rails 8 sparked a renaissance, it's gotten some attraction for new users again.

pawelduda 2y ago
Source?
- Alifatisk 2y ago
  I have no direct source, that's just what I have noticed from reading blogs about switching to Rails and by people on Twitter embracing the new release. I've also noticed the engagement in posts regarding Rails has increased and been reading comments by users who've never tried Rails giving it a shot and found it pleasant to work with.
- bluerooibos 2y ago
  Having been in the Rails community for seven years or so, I can say that there's been a lot more excitement and activity after Rails 7 (Hotwire stack). It doesn't seem that long ago, but we're already on Rails 8, which is now bringing a new round of excitement of its own. I've seen a ton of different "we're switching to Rails" posts floating around like these - * https://www.reddit.com/r/rails/comments/1dkcegr/im_switching_from_laravel_to_rails/ https://www.reddit.com/r/rails/comments/1dkcegr/im_switching... * https://www.reddit.com/r/rails/comments/1ah1b36/is_the_rails_revival_happening_right_now/ https://www.reddit.com/r/rails/comments/1ah1b36/is_the_rails... There's also the new Rails Foundation - https://rubyonrails.org/foundation https://rubyonrails.org/foundation and their new annual conference, Rails World, which has proved pretty popular - https://www.reddit.com/r/rails/comments/1fqizim/rails_world_2024_opening_keynote_david_heinemeier/ https://www.reddit.com/r/rails/comments/1fqizim/rails_world_... So, Rails ain't dead yet :)
  - pawelduda 2y ago
    Nice, happy to see that
- nop_slide 2y ago

Tainnor 2y ago

As with any technology, there are its supporters and its detractors. I would say that it's popularity has definitely waned in the last 10-15 years, probably in part due to Javascript gaining more ground, perceived performance problems with Ruby and the fact that many frameworks in other languages adopted some of Rails's best features (such as convention over configuration, DB migrations, unified project structures, etc.) and ignored its worst parts (such as monkeypatching).

olegp 2y ago

We're using it for https://www.freeats.com/ https://www.freeats.com/, an open source applicant tracking system we just launched. You can check out the source here: https://github.com/freeats/freeats https://github.com/freeats/freeats