4 ms·

The entire 2012 scene used Rails. Then they realized it was hard to scale and rewrote everything in Go.

rco8786 1y ago
> Then they realized it was hard to scale A rumor perpetuated by exactly one company - Twitter. I know because I was there when it happened and helped dismantle the original monolith. Rails scales just fine for 99%+ of business cases. If you're doing a sustained 5k writes per second with bursts up to 100k...sure maybe you need something more specialized.
- jerf 1y ago
  Rails has been around for time to change the calculus on it too. It came out in 2004. The smallest instances you can get today on AWS would have counted as fairly powerful servers back then (with insanely fast CPUs), and by the second or third smallest you're beyond anything available at the time, and there's still room to run after that. Even the slowest web frameworks running on modern hardware take some quite substantial load before they're a problem. It's good when choosing a framework to consider if you're doing stuff where that might be a problem, but it's also good not to overestimate the performance needs for your site.
- vidarh 1y ago
  Twitter also would've scaled a lot further on Rails just by dismantling the monolith. I don'tike Rails (though I love Ruby), but the way Rails was scapegoated for an original architecture that was not suited for scale irrespective of framework or language was annoying.
  - rco8786 1y ago
    Yep totally agree. And also realistically once we hit that kind of scale it was perfectly reasonably to start looking at other options as well. It's been a while but I think we were at like 250mm MAUs when we finally decided to break up the rails monolith (and I think it was still on Rails 3 at the time, but don't quote me on that). The number of companies that ever hit that kind of scale approaches zero, and even less in the B2B space.
kloop 1y ago
That makes perfect sense for people that need to scale. But doesn't explain why newer start ups aren't using it. Doing things that don't scale is a proven strategy at the beginning, pg even has a post about it https://www.paulgraham.com/ds.html https://www.paulgraham.com/ds.html
- dismalaf 1y ago
  > But doesn't explain why newer start ups aren't using it. Plenty of newer startups use Rails. At least several pretty much every YC batch. You just need to pay attention.
- wiseowise 1y ago
  No static typing would be a good dealbreaker for us.
  - vinceguidry 1y ago
    Ruby has static type system built into the language. https://github.com/ruby/rbs https://github.com/ruby/rbs There are others you can use if you like.
    - wiseowise 1y ago
      Unusable mess. Ruby should take lessons from Python and TS on how to make proper gradual typing.
      - Lio 1y ago
        I think a much better way forward is proposed by Jake Zimmerman[1] of the Sorbet team. That is to allow the runtime to parse RBS inline format comments. That retains Sorbet’s fast static checker and its runtime checks which Typescript compiled to JS lacks. 1. https://blog.jez.io/history-of-sorbet-syntax/ https://blog.jez.io/history-of-sorbet-syntax/
      - frou_dh 1y ago
        It should stay true to itself and not do it at all. Sigh - all languages needn't converge into Grey Goo.
byroot 1y ago
Nah. If anything it's NodeJS that ate Rails' lunch. Around 2013/2014 it took over as the defacto default stack for startup.
aqme28 1y ago
It scales just fine. AirBnB, Github, and Shopify use it.
- nopcode 1y ago
  It does now, but it took a few years for rails to do what nodejs did when it came out (the live chat demo app).
mrinterweb 1y ago
The rails doesn't scale trope is pretty old at this point and has largely been discredited. Don't believe me, take a look at Shopify or Github.

> Then they realized it was hard to scale A rumor perpetuated by exactly one company - Twitter. I know because I was there when it happened and helped dismantle the original monolith. Rails scales just fine for 99%+ of business cases. If you're doing a sustained 5k writes per second with bursts up to 100k...sure maybe you need something more specialized.

jerf 1y ago
Rails has been around for time to change the calculus on it too. It came out in 2004. The smallest instances you can get today on AWS would have counted as fairly powerful servers back then (with insanely fast CPUs), and by the second or third smallest you're beyond anything available at the time, and there's still room to run after that. Even the slowest web frameworks running on modern hardware take some quite substantial load before they're a problem. It's good when choosing a framework to consider if you're doing stuff where that might be a problem, but it's also good not to overestimate the performance needs for your site.
vidarh 1y ago
Twitter also would've scaled a lot further on Rails just by dismantling the monolith. I don'tike Rails (though I love Ruby), but the way Rails was scapegoated for an original architecture that was not suited for scale irrespective of framework or language was annoying.
- rco8786 1y ago
  Yep totally agree. And also realistically once we hit that kind of scale it was perfectly reasonably to start looking at other options as well. It's been a while but I think we were at like 250mm MAUs when we finally decided to break up the rails monolith (and I think it was still on Rails 3 at the time, but don't quote me on that). The number of companies that ever hit that kind of scale approaches zero, and even less in the B2B space.

kloop 1y ago

That makes perfect sense for people that need to scale. But doesn't explain why newer start ups aren't using it. Doing things that don't scale is a proven strategy at the beginning, pg even has a post about it https://www.paulgraham.com/ds.html https://www.paulgraham.com/ds.html

dismalaf 1y ago
> But doesn't explain why newer start ups aren't using it. Plenty of newer startups use Rails. At least several pretty much every YC batch. You just need to pay attention.
wiseowise 1y ago
No static typing would be a good dealbreaker for us.
- vinceguidry 1y ago
  Ruby has static type system built into the language. https://github.com/ruby/rbs https://github.com/ruby/rbs There are others you can use if you like.
  - wiseowise 1y ago
    Unusable mess. Ruby should take lessons from Python and TS on how to make proper gradual typing.
    - Lio 1y ago
      I think a much better way forward is proposed by Jake Zimmerman[1] of the Sorbet team. That is to allow the runtime to parse RBS inline format comments. That retains Sorbet’s fast static checker and its runtime checks which Typescript compiled to JS lacks. 1. https://blog.jez.io/history-of-sorbet-syntax/ https://blog.jez.io/history-of-sorbet-syntax/
    - frou_dh 1y ago
      It should stay true to itself and not do it at all. Sigh - all languages needn't converge into Grey Goo.

byroot 1y ago

Nah. If anything it's NodeJS that ate Rails' lunch. Around 2013/2014 it took over as the defacto default stack for startup.

aqme28 1y ago

It scales just fine. AirBnB, Github, and Shopify use it.

nopcode 1y ago
It does now, but it took a few years for rails to do what nodejs did when it came out (the live chat demo app).

mrinterweb 1y ago

The rails doesn't scale trope is pretty old at this point and has largely been discredited. Don't believe me, take a look at Shopify or Github.