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Stuff like that led me fully away from Ruby (due to Rails), which is a shame, I see videos of people chugging along with Ruby and loving it, and it looks like a

Stuff like that led me fully away from Ruby (due to Rails), which is a shame, I see videos of people chugging along with Ruby and loving it, and it looks like a fun language, but when the only way I can get a dev environment setup for Rails is using DigitalOcean droplets, I've lost all interest. It would always fail at compiling something for Rails. I would have loved to partake in the Rails hype back in 2012, but over the years the install / setup process was always a nightmare. I went with Python because I never had this issue. Now with any AI / CUDA stuff its a bit of a nightmare to the point where you use someone's setup shell script instead of trying to use pip at all.

nurettin 1y ago
Have you tried JRuby? It might be a bit too large for your droplet, but it has the java versions of most gems and you can produce cross-platform jars using warbler.
- nickserv 1y ago
  The speed of Ruby with the memory management of Java, what's not to love? Also, now you have two problems.
  - int_19h 1y ago
    Java has quite possibly the best production GC of all the VMs out there.
    - busterarm 1y ago
      And yet operating distributed systems built on it is a world of pain. Elasticsearch, I am looking at you. Modern hardware resources leave the limitations of running/scaling on top JVM to be an expensive, frustrating endeavor. In addition to elasticsearch's metrics, there's like 4 JVM metrics I have to watch constantly on all my clusters to make sure the JVM and its GC is happy.
  - nurettin 1y ago
    For me, it solves a very specific problem. In-house app that uses jdbc, is easy to develop and needs to be cross-platform (windows, linux, aix, as400). The speed picks up as it runs, usually handling 3000-5000 eps over UDP on decade old hardware.
awesome_dude 1y ago
Lets be honest here - whilst some experiences are better/worse than others, there doesn't seem to be a dependency management system that isn't (at least half) broken. I use Go a lot, the journey has been - No dependency management - Glide - Depmod - I forget the name of the precursor - I just remembered, VGo - Modules We still have proxying, vendoring, versioning problems Python: VirtualEnv Rust: Cargo Java: Maven and Gradle Ruby: Gems Even OS dependency management is painful - yum, apt (which was a major positive when I switched to Debian based systems), pkg (BSD people), homebrew (semi-official?) Dependency Management is the wild is a major headache, Go (I only mention because I am most familiar with) did away with some compilation dependency issues by shipping binaries with no dependencies (meaning that it didn't matter which version of linux you built your binary for, it will run on any of the same arch linux - none of that "wrong libc" 'fun'), but you still have issues with two different people building the same binary in need of extra dependency management (vendoring brings with it caching problems - is the version in the cache up to date, will updating one version of one dependency break everything - what fun)
- giancarlostoro 1y ago
  NuGet for C# has always been fantastic, and I like Cargo, though sometimes waiting for freaking ever for things to build does kill me on the inside a little bit. I do wish Go had a better package manager trajectory, I can only hope they continue to work on it, there were a few years I refused to work on any Go projects because setup was a nightmare.
  - cgravill 1y ago
    The main NuGet was problematic for a long time e.g. not providing any control over transitive dependencies (like pip at the time). You had to use https://fsprojects.github.io/Paket/ https://fsprojects.github.io/Paket/ if you wanted safe and consistent resolution. NuGet since got their act together and it’s not as flawed now.
- orhmeh09 1y ago
  I think CRAN for R is very good, partly aided by an aggressive pruning policy for broken packages.
ilvez 1y ago
Do I get it right that this issue is within Windows? I've never heard of the issues you describe while working with Linux.. I've seen people struggle with MacOS a bit due to brew different versions of some library or the other, mostly self compiling Ruby.
- threeducks 1y ago
  There certainly are issues on Linux as well. The Detectron2 library alone has several hundred issues related to incorrect versions of something: https://github.com/facebookresearch/detectron2/issues https://github.com/facebookresearch/detectron2/issues The mmdetection library (https://github.com/open-mmlab/mmdetection/issues https://github.com/open-mmlab/mmdetection/issues) also has hundreds of version-related issues. Admittedly, that library has not seen any updates for over a year now, but it is sad that things just break and become basically unusable on modern Linux operating systems because NVIDIA can't stop breaking backwards and forwards compatibility for what is essentially just fancy matrix multiplication.
- jcelerier 1y ago
  On Linux good luck if you're not using anything besides the officially nvidia-supported Ubuntu version. Just 24.04 instead of 22.04 has regular random breakages and issues, and running on archlinux is just endless pain.
- giancarlostoro 1y ago
  I had issues on Mac, Windows and Linux... It was obnoxious. It led me to adopt a very simple rule: if I cannot get your framework / programming language up and running in under 10 minutes (barring compilation time / download speeds) I am not going to use your tools / language. I shouldn't be struggling with the most basic of hello worlds with your language / framework. I don't in like 100% of the other languages I already use, why should I struggle to use a new language?
poly2it 1y ago
Have you tried Nix? https://nixos.org https://nixos.org
- c0balt 1y ago
  Given they mentioned Windows (and not WSL) that might not be a viable option. AFAIK, Windows is not natively supported by nixpkgs.
- giancarlostoro 1y ago
  I'm on Arch these days, but nix would have maybe helped, but this was 2010s where as far as I remember, nobody was talking about NixOS.
viraptor 1y ago
I would recommend learning a little bit of C compilation and build systems. Ruby/Rails is about as polished as you could get for a very popular project. Maybe libyaml will be a problem once in a while if you're compiling Ruby from scratch, but otherwise this normally works without a hassle. And those skills will apply everywhere else. As long as we have C libraries, this is about as good as it gets, regardless of the language/runtime.
chao- 1y ago
I'm surprised to hear that. Ruby was the first language in my life/career where I felt good about the dependency management and packaging solution. Even when I was a novice, I don't remember running into any problems that weren't obviously my fault (for example, installing the Ruby library for PostgreSQL before I had installed the Postgres libraries on the OS). Meanwhile, I didn't feel like Python had reached the bare minimum for package management until Pipenv came on the scene. It wasn't until Poetry (in 2019? 2020?) that I felt like the ecosystem had reached what Ruby had back in 2010 or 2011 when bundler had become mostly stable.
- thedanbob 1y ago
  Bundler has always been the best package manager of any language that I've used, but dealing with gem extensions can still be a pain. I've had lots of fun bugs where an extension worked in dev but not prod because of differences in library versions. I ended up creating a docker image for development that matched our production environment and that pretty much solved those problems.
  - awesome_dude 1y ago
    > I ended up creating a docker image for development that matched our production environment and that pretty much solved those problems. docker has massively improved things - but it still has edge cases (you have to be really pushing it hard to find them though)
  - skydhash 1y ago
    That's one of the reason I prefer a dev environment (either physical install or VM) that matches prod. Barring that I would go with with a build system (container-based?) that can be local. Otherwise it's painful.
avidphantasm 1y ago
Have you tried conda? Since the integration of mamba its solver is fast and the breadth of packages is impressive. Also, if you have to support Windows and Python with native extensions, conda is a godsend.
- orhmeh09 1y ago
  It is not fast. Mamba and micromamba are still much faster than conda and yet lack basic features that conda has to provide. Everyone is dropping conda like a hot plate since the licensing changes in 2024.

nurettin 1y ago

Have you tried JRuby? It might be a bit too large for your droplet, but it has the java versions of most gems and you can produce cross-platform jars using warbler.

nickserv 1y ago
The speed of Ruby with the memory management of Java, what's not to love? Also, now you have two problems.
- int_19h 1y ago
  Java has quite possibly the best production GC of all the VMs out there.
  - busterarm 1y ago
    And yet operating distributed systems built on it is a world of pain. Elasticsearch, I am looking at you. Modern hardware resources leave the limitations of running/scaling on top JVM to be an expensive, frustrating endeavor. In addition to elasticsearch's metrics, there's like 4 JVM metrics I have to watch constantly on all my clusters to make sure the JVM and its GC is happy.
- nurettin 1y ago
  For me, it solves a very specific problem. In-house app that uses jdbc, is easy to develop and needs to be cross-platform (windows, linux, aix, as400). The speed picks up as it runs, usually handling 3000-5000 eps over UDP on decade old hardware.

awesome_dude 1y ago

Lets be honest here - whilst some experiences are better/worse than others, there doesn't seem to be a dependency management system that isn't (at least half) broken. I use Go a lot, the journey has been - No dependency management - Glide - Depmod - I forget the name of the precursor - I just remembered, VGo - Modules We still have proxying, vendoring, versioning problems Python: VirtualEnv Rust: Cargo Java: Maven and Gradle Ruby: Gems Even OS dependency management is painful - yum, apt (which was a major positive when I switched to Debian based systems), pkg (BSD people), homebrew (semi-official?) Dependency Management is the wild is a major headache, Go (I only mention because I am most familiar with) did away with some compilation dependency issues by shipping binaries with no dependencies (meaning that it didn't matter which version of linux you built your binary for, it will run on any of the same arch linux - none of that "wrong libc" 'fun'), but you still have issues with two different people building the same binary in need of extra dependency management (vendoring brings with it caching problems - is the version in the cache up to date, will updating one version of one dependency break everything - what fun)

giancarlostoro 1y ago
NuGet for C# has always been fantastic, and I like Cargo, though sometimes waiting for freaking ever for things to build does kill me on the inside a little bit. I do wish Go had a better package manager trajectory, I can only hope they continue to work on it, there were a few years I refused to work on any Go projects because setup was a nightmare.
- cgravill 1y ago
  The main NuGet was problematic for a long time e.g. not providing any control over transitive dependencies (like pip at the time). You had to use https://fsprojects.github.io/Paket/ https://fsprojects.github.io/Paket/ if you wanted safe and consistent resolution. NuGet since got their act together and it’s not as flawed now.
orhmeh09 1y ago
I think CRAN for R is very good, partly aided by an aggressive pruning policy for broken packages.

ilvez 1y ago

Do I get it right that this issue is within Windows? I've never heard of the issues you describe while working with Linux.. I've seen people struggle with MacOS a bit due to brew different versions of some library or the other, mostly self compiling Ruby.

threeducks 1y ago
There certainly are issues on Linux as well. The Detectron2 library alone has several hundred issues related to incorrect versions of something: https://github.com/facebookresearch/detectron2/issues https://github.com/facebookresearch/detectron2/issues The mmdetection library (https://github.com/open-mmlab/mmdetection/issues https://github.com/open-mmlab/mmdetection/issues) also has hundreds of version-related issues. Admittedly, that library has not seen any updates for over a year now, but it is sad that things just break and become basically unusable on modern Linux operating systems because NVIDIA can't stop breaking backwards and forwards compatibility for what is essentially just fancy matrix multiplication.
jcelerier 1y ago
On Linux good luck if you're not using anything besides the officially nvidia-supported Ubuntu version. Just 24.04 instead of 22.04 has regular random breakages and issues, and running on archlinux is just endless pain.
giancarlostoro 1y ago
I had issues on Mac, Windows and Linux... It was obnoxious. It led me to adopt a very simple rule: if I cannot get your framework / programming language up and running in under 10 minutes (barring compilation time / download speeds) I am not going to use your tools / language. I shouldn't be struggling with the most basic of hello worlds with your language / framework. I don't in like 100% of the other languages I already use, why should I struggle to use a new language?

poly2it 1y ago

Have you tried Nix? https://nixos.org https://nixos.org

c0balt 1y ago
Given they mentioned Windows (and not WSL) that might not be a viable option. AFAIK, Windows is not natively supported by nixpkgs.
giancarlostoro 1y ago
I'm on Arch these days, but nix would have maybe helped, but this was 2010s where as far as I remember, nobody was talking about NixOS.

viraptor 1y ago

I would recommend learning a little bit of C compilation and build systems. Ruby/Rails is about as polished as you could get for a very popular project. Maybe libyaml will be a problem once in a while if you're compiling Ruby from scratch, but otherwise this normally works without a hassle. And those skills will apply everywhere else. As long as we have C libraries, this is about as good as it gets, regardless of the language/runtime.

chao- 1y ago

I'm surprised to hear that. Ruby was the first language in my life/career where I felt good about the dependency management and packaging solution. Even when I was a novice, I don't remember running into any problems that weren't obviously my fault (for example, installing the Ruby library for PostgreSQL before I had installed the Postgres libraries on the OS). Meanwhile, I didn't feel like Python had reached the bare minimum for package management until Pipenv came on the scene. It wasn't until Poetry (in 2019? 2020?) that I felt like the ecosystem had reached what Ruby had back in 2010 or 2011 when bundler had become mostly stable.

thedanbob 1y ago
Bundler has always been the best package manager of any language that I've used, but dealing with gem extensions can still be a pain. I've had lots of fun bugs where an extension worked in dev but not prod because of differences in library versions. I ended up creating a docker image for development that matched our production environment and that pretty much solved those problems.
- awesome_dude 1y ago
  > I ended up creating a docker image for development that matched our production environment and that pretty much solved those problems. docker has massively improved things - but it still has edge cases (you have to be really pushing it hard to find them though)
- skydhash 1y ago
  That's one of the reason I prefer a dev environment (either physical install or VM) that matches prod. Barring that I would go with with a build system (container-based?) that can be local. Otherwise it's painful.

avidphantasm 1y ago

Have you tried conda? Since the integration of mamba its solver is fast and the breadth of packages is impressive. Also, if you have to support Windows and Python with native extensions, conda is a godsend.

orhmeh09 1y ago
It is not fast. Mamba and micromamba are still much faster than conda and yet lack basic features that conda has to provide. Everyone is dropping conda like a hot plate since the licensing changes in 2024.