7 ms·

Twitter jilts Ruby for Scala

85 points by astrec 18y ago

petercooper 18y ago
And in case you're wondering.. no, this isn't an April Fools joke.
- tptacek 18y ago
  In this case, it'd've been a joke cued up several months ago, when this story first broke.
nessence 18y ago
"And he's pitching his new Scala book. And his new Scala book is published by O'Reilly. And O'Reilly runs the Web 2.0 Expo. ®" Timing is priceless.
- sachinag 18y ago
  So what? He likes Scala. Likes it enough to write a book in his spare time, of which he has precious little since he's, oh yeah, a full-time developer at one of the biggest, fastest growing sites on the face of God's green earth. So it's a (mild) conflict-of-interest (really, it's just a promotional opportunity). Doesn't make the arguments any less valid or his book any less worth picking up. Nice thing about code is that it's like science - every claim can be tested ad infinitum.
  - Semiapies 18y ago
    And if the Scala reworking goes poorly, he presumably suffers, too. One idle thought: It'd be hard to eliminate the factor that they might be a better Scala dev team than a Ruby dev team. That's still, of course, a perfectly good reason to go to Scala.
jseifer 18y ago
"Investors now want to know that you're not going to be paying tons and tons of money for servers because you decided to build in a stack that isn't as efficient as possible," he said. I've never used Scala and I'm a Ruby dev but I'm still not sure I totally agree with that. Scala is probably great and very efficient but you probably don't need to be thinking at Twitter's level out of the gate.
- tptacek 18y ago
  It's also the case that headcount is far more expensive than servers.
  - Tichy 18y ago
    Still, I worry that despite Ruby's niceness, a lot of time is spent developing around it's issues. Whenever I read about deploying Ruby, it just sounds scary. Memory munching Mongrels that have to be restarted on a regular basis? It sounds like a science in itself, whereas tomcat just runs and runs and runs. Less headaches == less headcount.
    - cageface 18y ago
      Thankfully these issues have been completely solved by passenger/mod_rails. Deploying Rails apps is now trivial and stability (at least outside of extreme loads) isn't an issue.
    - rcoder 18y ago
      If you know and like Tomcat, may I suggest you have a look at JRuby deployment for Rails apps? With recent versions of jruby-rack and the warbler gem, it's as simple as listing your dependencies in a config file, and then running 'rake war' from the top level of a Rails app to get a shiny new WAR file ready to drop into your Tomcat deployment directory.
  - rcoder 18y ago
    A really talented sysadmin with good tools may be able to manage 100 servers; a great developer can optimize your algorithms to get an order-of-magnitude reduction in the number of servers you need. Eventually, more servers == more headcount.
zmimon 18y ago
The very title of this article shows the religious nature of much of the hype around dynamic languages. Why is using the right tool for the job "jilting" another language which was never designed or meant to be suitable for the same job? I am curious though whether they tried running their Ruby code using JRuby ... if the bottlenecks were (as stated in the article) in the ruby VM they might have got the same result just by switching VMs (pure speculation). And ... > "The biggest selling point for certain organizations is that Scala is 100 per cent compatible with your existing JVM code. No, it's not. There are problems with quite important features like annotations etc. which are now very important in the java EE space but Scala cannot do them. This was one reason I've used Groovy so far in a lot of situations. Having said that - I'm seriously looking at Scala because groovy has plenty of faults: the complete lack of any static type checking at compile time and very poor IDE support and error reporting all weigh down on the productivity benefits to the point where it's sometimes a net negative. Scala could end up being the best of all worlds.
- michaelneale 18y ago
  >Why is using the right tool for the job "jilting" another language which was never designed or meant to be suitable for the same job? That would be a question for the journalist who made it up ;) I am sure the answer was "cause it sounded cool !".
  - jhancock 18y ago
    that's pretty much how "the Reg" operates. Without regard to the tone of the article though, Scala and Lift are worth spending some time with. Lift still has a ways to go in terms of providing a turnkey stack in the same vein as a Rails or Merb stack. If you thought putting together a Ruby dev environment had a lot of pieces, get ready for Lift...not so much Lift's fault as its the nature of the heavyweight JVM toolset world.
    - michaelneale 18y ago
      I love scala, as a language, and love rails, as a framework which doesn't make me thing to much - I can see how twitter would like the combo too. Even with the toolchain annoyances I think scala is pretty productive, at least it is for me.
awt 18y ago
it seems that the article ignores the trade off in cost between efficient code and development time.
- jimbokun 18y ago
  Scala tries to be pretty good at both. Java like speeds, with type-inferencing, first class functions, and a more flexible syntax to improve programming productivity.
  - deleted 18y ago
    [deleted]
- ewjordan 18y ago
  Maybe the article ignores that trade off, but Twitter is not really a "startup" anymore, so they are correctly leaving the startup mindset behind and beginning to analyze where they are wasting resources and what they can do about it. If the expected total cost of rewriting and maintaining the codebase (over and above the cost of maintaining the current code, of course) to get an N% efficiency increase is less than the amount you will save on hardware, then it's worthwhile to do. For a relatively simple application, which Twitter is, I'm unsurprised that a re-write/port is a fairly low cost ordeal, and might provide enough savings over time to be worthwhile. I also take issue with the implicit claim that RoR is automatically more productive than Scala + Lift - Lift might be a little younger than Rails, true, but it's still a pretty solid piece of work, especially if you don't have to beat against the edges too much. And if you put some experienced Scala people up against similarly skilled Ruby folk in a "code race," I'd expect it to be a pretty fair match. This is not Java we're talking about, Scala can be extremely powerful in the hands of someone that knows what they're doing, and I imagine the Twitter guys have enough of those people that they'll do just fine.
alecco 18y ago
Unfounded claims, no research, nothing. After years of suffering websites running on JVM web stacks, I am very sceptic of this Scala for the web rant. Plus he extrapolates Ruby to Python and PHP just because. The JVMs (there are several) mostly trade-off memory for speed. Go check the Language Shootout page. It doesn't scale in my book. So unless Scala has some secret ingredient to use the JVM more efficiently, this looks to me as yet another fanboy rant.
- rcoder 18y ago
  First of all, I don't think it's fair to accuse the Twitter dev team of working without real experience and numbers to back up their decisions. They have a huge volume of data being generated by their service, and have weathered the whole "Rails doesn't scale" flame-fest with relative grace and good humor. IMHO, that entitles them to talk fairly freely about the relative scalability of different languages and frameworks. Secondly, any "ranting" you hear in this article is the product of El Reg, not Alex. He mostly offered a calm, positive presentation about the improved speed (with relatively little, if any, tradeoff in developer productivity) that came from using Scala instead of Ruby for critical infrastructure services. Regardless, most Java web applications' performance issues stem from framework-itis, not from the underlying runtime. By itself, Tomcat (or another modern Java servlet container) is capable of some pretty impressive throughput -- perhaps not on par with a lean, pure C server like nginx, but not nearly as limited in functionality and extensibility, either. No matter what you think about Java the language, you at least have to admit that HotSpot blows MRI, YARV, the Python VM, and Parrot out of the water when it comes to raw performance on low-level code. That doesn't save you from bad implementation ideas, but it does at least give you the possibility of getting fast, efficient code, if you have a decent compiler and work fairly close to the metal. Using Scala is one way to produce that sort of low-level implementation code without wanting to gouge your eyes out (which is how most Java source tends to make me feel, anyway).
  - alecco 18y ago
    No, the JVMs use memory like crazy themselves, it's not just the frameworks. As I said, check out the Language Shootout. Java, in almost every test, is several times bigger than most other languages. The rest of your comment, you change what I said so it's not worth addressing.
oomkiller 18y ago
I think anyone who has any depth of experience with Ruby can attest to the flaws it has data-intensive tasks. Thats why many of us just drop down into another language when we need to get something done efficiently. Ruby's clarity and conciseness make a lot of sense when writing views, controllers, and models, but don't have the same effectiveness in a background process that needs to be written and forgotten about. Unless there are some major changes in Ruby (MORE than 1.9), I believe that it will be relegated to simple web applications, and never really be good at processing tons of data. And honestly, isn't Ruby really just about prototyping? I admit, its great for startups who have nil for cash that need to get something written QUICK (to get money from investors), but once you cross that threshold, why not write it over with a language designed for efficiency?
- ashot 18y ago
  I'm not a ruby dev, but could you be more specific? Assuming you are refering to syntax, not speed: how is it good for prototyping but not "data-intensive tasks"
  - fizx 18y ago
    One example: Ruby has slow IO and text-processing capabilities. I sometimes write pipeline tasks in Ruby or Perl. i.e. while line = STDIN.gets; puts transform(line); end. Typical disk bandwidth is 2MB/s in Ruby, and 25-120MB/s in Perl, Java, Awk, or C. Beyond that, a lot of the metaprogramming features that make Ruby cool are also expensive when done repetitively. Also, Ruby's threads REALLY suck. And it has impossible to track down memory leaks in the interpreter. Ask mojombo about fun with those.
  - emmett 18y ago
    All of the Ruby runtimes are unreliable (buggy) and very slow. Ruby syntax is perfectly good for "data-intensive tasks", but the current runtimes are not.
    - ewjordan 18y ago
      How does JRuby's implementation compare to Scala's, though? I've been pleased overall with Scala, but I've not had much JRuby experience, so I'm curious.
c00p3r 18y ago
That is so funny to choice JVM-based stuff is case when you need an accept/select/read/write hardcore (message passing) along with queue processing. Of course, you can do networking from JVM, and it works well in clean cisco-branded qos-enabled networks. =) If one had had an experience of using java-based network tools over cellular or wireless networks, one knows. At the same time, Erlang is around for a decade.
intranation 18y ago
This quote: "The trouble, he insisted, is that the so-called Web 2.0 languages aren't always as efficient as they need to be, especially in an economic environment threatening to bring Web 2.0 to its knees." Is particularly dire. Sure, so if we all switch to C or machine code we'll be able to skip through the recession, right? Seriously, less drama and more reporting please.
jpcx01 18y ago
Seems like a perfectly reasonable approach. They still are going to continue using Ruby on the front end of the site. It's just the backend message queuing, and data operational stuff that they're moving to Scala. I probably would have just used JRuby for this stuff, but Scala seems fine to me. And if it works for them, thats great. But I hardly see this a "jilt" against Ruby.
- dkarl 18y ago
  JRuby is what, a few times faster than Ruby 1.8.x? In a situation where Ruby was too slow, even after optimization by experienced Ruby coders, I don't see how switching to JRuby would have helped. Is there a crucial performance difference (threading maybe, or libraries) that would have made JRuby scale better than Ruby in this case?
  - jpedrosa 18y ago
    I use JRuby to run a web application that I first coded in Ruby and it works pretty well even though it reserves and consumes more memory. Having a dedicated server for JRuby applications instead of running such applications on your own desktop alongside other applications slightly helps with the feeling of speed of the JRuby application, as it does not compete for CPU time with the other desktop applications you have like the browser, when you can feel that JRuby requires more work than Ruby for doing similar workloads. :-) I know that the pros of JRuby for running Ruby applications mean things like being able to run multiple instances of Ruby from the same process, being able to run JRuby applications in a standard Java web-server be it as Servlet or a more high-level installation, and so on. Also, Java has had a lot experience in running server applications so Java does help with maximizing the use of the resources available, be it 100% of CPU time, gigs of memory, multiple CPUs, and so on. Java has those famous garbage collectors and HotSpot technologies. JRuby can enjoy all of that so it does improve things over pure Ruby. Let's say, Java doesn't break a sweat under heavy load, or at least it shouldn't. Whereas with pure Ruby all bets are off.
donal 18y ago
Sheesh, from the comments you'd think The Register is known for level-headed journalism. It is a snarky, piss-taking, grease-trap that mixes news with commentary with little to no discretion or fear of violating "journalistic integrity." Once you understand that, it becomes a great source of news and entertainment.
- jrockway 18y ago
  Once you understand that, it becomes a great source of news and entertainment. Or rather, a great site to ignore.
nir 18y ago
Carpenter jilts saw for hammer [EDIT: dear downmodders, the intention here is that languages are tools, and you pick the one which fits your current needs best. What's good for Twitter isn't necessarily best for another app, and Scala <=> Ruby is meaningless]
- alecco 18y ago
  HN is getting lamer than ever with this downmodding of anybody who doesn't conform. It would be interesting to know the overlap of opinion-based down-modders and Reddit/Digg bashers.
jpedrosa 18y ago
Seeing the April 1st date of the article it was just a little bit harder to believe they would write it like that. As folks have taken it seriously... The Ruby community was formed without being forced into it necessarily. Academics did not force people into Ruby. Businesses did not force people into Ruby. Even Ruby on Rails was created because DHH was not forced to use PHP and instead tried to make things work in this new called Ruby. Scala has its followers but Academics push it and business types can push it as well even though many business types still prefer Java and C#. Also, Scala is being primarily used for server-side stuff which is a very crowded market already and many developers are just a little bit too tired of having to interface with complex server-side stuff while trying to innovate on the client-side. Thing is, as a guy who really digs Ruby, Scala does not worry me one bit. I could always try and use a hyper-advanced Scala implementation or application in the future given I can make choices at one point and then have to revisit said choices in the future given the changes brought by new developments. Let me tell you a little story. When C# was being first introduced in its very early versions, I was very much playing Ultima Online on pirate servers. A new pirate server was being coded in C# and it was becoming rather popular quite fast and the single developer (or was it?) was having quite a lot of fun with it. Nobody told him to use C# for that kind of thing I am sure, it was just him putting his passion forward with the means he had at the time. C# has grown since then, and many pros and hobbyists use it to create all kinds of little programs on Windows. Scala? Scala has an uphill battle, and many other languages have had their own uphill battles throughout the years. It's tough.
- jrockway 18y ago
  Uh, who cares? Some day you will realize that programming languages are tools for getting work done, not religions.
Semiapies 18y ago
Following Twitter's issue blog, most of their problems appear database-related. I wonder whether a shift to Scala would have any real effect.
- cosmo7 18y ago
  Threading.
  - Semiapies 18y ago
    Hmm, I could see that. I just wonder how many of their problems actually come down to thread issues. May just have to wait and see whether their new "beautiful code" does any better. :)
cosmo7 18y ago
Although the Reg sensationalizes the story, it's interesting to see how Ruby is in limbo. How much damage has been done to Merb by the 1.8 to 1.9 fiasco?
- jpedrosa 18y ago
  I agree that the Ruby 1.8 to 1.9 transition has caused headaches. But the 1.9 version does have some interesting features that have been long being cooked to get to this point, and perhaps more interesting is that the 1.9 version has motivated even more developments in Ruby-land as found in MacRuby that uses the 1.9 version or in yarv2llvm that recompiles the bytecode to llvm or something. Let's say that many folks might have had higher expectations that have been hard to meet given the reality of it all. The Merb guys helped with further explorations themselves which probably helped with making Rails advance more decisively, given the promissed "merging" of the Merb ideals with Rails. Also, with things like Passenger, the deployment of Ruby met an all-time high in features.
dpnewman 18y ago
I think it's important to remember that Twitter had this problem because they were ULTRA successful to the degree of being a household name, a new cultural lingo, a game changing tech of enormous value, etc. Yes, different languages and techs for different advantages and purposes. "Just" developing a web app with models and views and controllers is enough to create the user experience smash hits are made off. Scaling issues are big, but certainly fall in the class of problems we want to have at some point.
- antirez 18y ago
  > Scaling issues are big, but certainly fall in the class of problems we want to have at some point. Well actually with a big of good design from start you may avoid this problem from the start with little efforts. You'll have to scale anyway but it will be a matter of buying more hardware and not redesigning the system.
antirez 18y ago
I don't understand a lot this approach. Basically the front-end is almost always not the problem, but the Db / backend is. And this should be written in C probably. If you write a queue system in Ruby and it's slow where is the news? The article title is misleading since Ruby continues to be used for its core business that is the front end.

85 points by astrec 18y ago

petercooper 18y ago

And in case you're wondering.. no, this isn't an April Fools joke.

tptacek 18y ago
In this case, it'd've been a joke cued up several months ago, when this story first broke.

nessence 18y ago

"And he's pitching his new Scala book. And his new Scala book is published by O'Reilly. And O'Reilly runs the Web 2.0 Expo. ®" Timing is priceless.

sachinag 18y ago
So what? He likes Scala. Likes it enough to write a book in his spare time, of which he has precious little since he's, oh yeah, a full-time developer at one of the biggest, fastest growing sites on the face of God's green earth. So it's a (mild) conflict-of-interest (really, it's just a promotional opportunity). Doesn't make the arguments any less valid or his book any less worth picking up. Nice thing about code is that it's like science - every claim can be tested ad infinitum.
- Semiapies 18y ago
  And if the Scala reworking goes poorly, he presumably suffers, too. One idle thought: It'd be hard to eliminate the factor that they might be a better Scala dev team than a Ruby dev team. That's still, of course, a perfectly good reason to go to Scala.

jseifer 18y ago

"Investors now want to know that you're not going to be paying tons and tons of money for servers because you decided to build in a stack that isn't as efficient as possible," he said. I've never used Scala and I'm a Ruby dev but I'm still not sure I totally agree with that. Scala is probably great and very efficient but you probably don't need to be thinking at Twitter's level out of the gate.

tptacek 18y ago
It's also the case that headcount is far more expensive than servers.
- Tichy 18y ago
  Still, I worry that despite Ruby's niceness, a lot of time is spent developing around it's issues. Whenever I read about deploying Ruby, it just sounds scary. Memory munching Mongrels that have to be restarted on a regular basis? It sounds like a science in itself, whereas tomcat just runs and runs and runs. Less headaches == less headcount.
  - cageface 18y ago
    Thankfully these issues have been completely solved by passenger/mod_rails. Deploying Rails apps is now trivial and stability (at least outside of extreme loads) isn't an issue.
  - rcoder 18y ago
    If you know and like Tomcat, may I suggest you have a look at JRuby deployment for Rails apps? With recent versions of jruby-rack and the warbler gem, it's as simple as listing your dependencies in a config file, and then running 'rake war' from the top level of a Rails app to get a shiny new WAR file ready to drop into your Tomcat deployment directory.
- rcoder 18y ago
  A really talented sysadmin with good tools may be able to manage 100 servers; a great developer can optimize your algorithms to get an order-of-magnitude reduction in the number of servers you need. Eventually, more servers == more headcount.

zmimon 18y ago

The very title of this article shows the religious nature of much of the hype around dynamic languages. Why is using the right tool for the job "jilting" another language which was never designed or meant to be suitable for the same job? I am curious though whether they tried running their Ruby code using JRuby ... if the bottlenecks were (as stated in the article) in the ruby VM they might have got the same result just by switching VMs (pure speculation). And ... > "The biggest selling point for certain organizations is that Scala is 100 per cent compatible with your existing JVM code. No, it's not. There are problems with quite important features like annotations etc. which are now very important in the java EE space but Scala cannot do them. This was one reason I've used Groovy so far in a lot of situations. Having said that - I'm seriously looking at Scala because groovy has plenty of faults: the complete lack of any static type checking at compile time and very poor IDE support and error reporting all weigh down on the productivity benefits to the point where it's sometimes a net negative. Scala could end up being the best of all worlds.

michaelneale 18y ago
>Why is using the right tool for the job "jilting" another language which was never designed or meant to be suitable for the same job? That would be a question for the journalist who made it up ;) I am sure the answer was "cause it sounded cool !".
- jhancock 18y ago
  that's pretty much how "the Reg" operates. Without regard to the tone of the article though, Scala and Lift are worth spending some time with. Lift still has a ways to go in terms of providing a turnkey stack in the same vein as a Rails or Merb stack. If you thought putting together a Ruby dev environment had a lot of pieces, get ready for Lift...not so much Lift's fault as its the nature of the heavyweight JVM toolset world.
  - michaelneale 18y ago
    I love scala, as a language, and love rails, as a framework which doesn't make me thing to much - I can see how twitter would like the combo too. Even with the toolchain annoyances I think scala is pretty productive, at least it is for me.

awt 18y ago

it seems that the article ignores the trade off in cost between efficient code and development time.

jimbokun 18y ago
Scala tries to be pretty good at both. Java like speeds, with type-inferencing, first class functions, and a more flexible syntax to improve programming productivity.
- deleted 18y ago
  [deleted]
ewjordan 18y ago
Maybe the article ignores that trade off, but Twitter is not really a "startup" anymore, so they are correctly leaving the startup mindset behind and beginning to analyze where they are wasting resources and what they can do about it. If the expected total cost of rewriting and maintaining the codebase (over and above the cost of maintaining the current code, of course) to get an N% efficiency increase is less than the amount you will save on hardware, then it's worthwhile to do. For a relatively simple application, which Twitter is, I'm unsurprised that a re-write/port is a fairly low cost ordeal, and might provide enough savings over time to be worthwhile. I also take issue with the implicit claim that RoR is automatically more productive than Scala + Lift - Lift might be a little younger than Rails, true, but it's still a pretty solid piece of work, especially if you don't have to beat against the edges too much. And if you put some experienced Scala people up against similarly skilled Ruby folk in a "code race," I'd expect it to be a pretty fair match. This is not Java we're talking about, Scala can be extremely powerful in the hands of someone that knows what they're doing, and I imagine the Twitter guys have enough of those people that they'll do just fine.

alecco 18y ago

Unfounded claims, no research, nothing. After years of suffering websites running on JVM web stacks, I am very sceptic of this Scala for the web rant. Plus he extrapolates Ruby to Python and PHP just because. The JVMs (there are several) mostly trade-off memory for speed. Go check the Language Shootout page. It doesn't scale in my book. So unless Scala has some secret ingredient to use the JVM more efficiently, this looks to me as yet another fanboy rant.

rcoder 18y ago
First of all, I don't think it's fair to accuse the Twitter dev team of working without real experience and numbers to back up their decisions. They have a huge volume of data being generated by their service, and have weathered the whole "Rails doesn't scale" flame-fest with relative grace and good humor. IMHO, that entitles them to talk fairly freely about the relative scalability of different languages and frameworks. Secondly, any "ranting" you hear in this article is the product of El Reg, not Alex. He mostly offered a calm, positive presentation about the improved speed (with relatively little, if any, tradeoff in developer productivity) that came from using Scala instead of Ruby for critical infrastructure services. Regardless, most Java web applications' performance issues stem from framework-itis, not from the underlying runtime. By itself, Tomcat (or another modern Java servlet container) is capable of some pretty impressive throughput -- perhaps not on par with a lean, pure C server like nginx, but not nearly as limited in functionality and extensibility, either. No matter what you think about Java the language, you at least have to admit that HotSpot blows MRI, YARV, the Python VM, and Parrot out of the water when it comes to raw performance on low-level code. That doesn't save you from bad implementation ideas, but it does at least give you the possibility of getting fast, efficient code, if you have a decent compiler and work fairly close to the metal. Using Scala is one way to produce that sort of low-level implementation code without wanting to gouge your eyes out (which is how most Java source tends to make me feel, anyway).
- alecco 18y ago
  No, the JVMs use memory like crazy themselves, it's not just the frameworks. As I said, check out the Language Shootout. Java, in almost every test, is several times bigger than most other languages. The rest of your comment, you change what I said so it's not worth addressing.

oomkiller 18y ago

I think anyone who has any depth of experience with Ruby can attest to the flaws it has data-intensive tasks. Thats why many of us just drop down into another language when we need to get something done efficiently. Ruby's clarity and conciseness make a lot of sense when writing views, controllers, and models, but don't have the same effectiveness in a background process that needs to be written and forgotten about. Unless there are some major changes in Ruby (MORE than 1.9), I believe that it will be relegated to simple web applications, and never really be good at processing tons of data. And honestly, isn't Ruby really just about prototyping? I admit, its great for startups who have nil for cash that need to get something written QUICK (to get money from investors), but once you cross that threshold, why not write it over with a language designed for efficiency?

ashot 18y ago
I'm not a ruby dev, but could you be more specific? Assuming you are refering to syntax, not speed: how is it good for prototyping but not "data-intensive tasks"
- fizx 18y ago
  One example: Ruby has slow IO and text-processing capabilities. I sometimes write pipeline tasks in Ruby or Perl. i.e. while line = STDIN.gets; puts transform(line); end. Typical disk bandwidth is 2MB/s in Ruby, and 25-120MB/s in Perl, Java, Awk, or C. Beyond that, a lot of the metaprogramming features that make Ruby cool are also expensive when done repetitively. Also, Ruby's threads REALLY suck. And it has impossible to track down memory leaks in the interpreter. Ask mojombo about fun with those.
- emmett 18y ago
  All of the Ruby runtimes are unreliable (buggy) and very slow. Ruby syntax is perfectly good for "data-intensive tasks", but the current runtimes are not.
  - ewjordan 18y ago
    How does JRuby's implementation compare to Scala's, though? I've been pleased overall with Scala, but I've not had much JRuby experience, so I'm curious.

c00p3r 18y ago

That is so funny to choice JVM-based stuff is case when you need an accept/select/read/write hardcore (message passing) along with queue processing. Of course, you can do networking from JVM, and it works well in clean cisco-branded qos-enabled networks. =) If one had had an experience of using java-based network tools over cellular or wireless networks, one knows. At the same time, Erlang is around for a decade.

intranation 18y ago

This quote: "The trouble, he insisted, is that the so-called Web 2.0 languages aren't always as efficient as they need to be, especially in an economic environment threatening to bring Web 2.0 to its knees." Is particularly dire. Sure, so if we all switch to C or machine code we'll be able to skip through the recession, right? Seriously, less drama and more reporting please.

jpcx01 18y ago

Seems like a perfectly reasonable approach. They still are going to continue using Ruby on the front end of the site. It's just the backend message queuing, and data operational stuff that they're moving to Scala. I probably would have just used JRuby for this stuff, but Scala seems fine to me. And if it works for them, thats great. But I hardly see this a "jilt" against Ruby.

dkarl 18y ago
JRuby is what, a few times faster than Ruby 1.8.x? In a situation where Ruby was too slow, even after optimization by experienced Ruby coders, I don't see how switching to JRuby would have helped. Is there a crucial performance difference (threading maybe, or libraries) that would have made JRuby scale better than Ruby in this case?
- jpedrosa 18y ago
  I use JRuby to run a web application that I first coded in Ruby and it works pretty well even though it reserves and consumes more memory. Having a dedicated server for JRuby applications instead of running such applications on your own desktop alongside other applications slightly helps with the feeling of speed of the JRuby application, as it does not compete for CPU time with the other desktop applications you have like the browser, when you can feel that JRuby requires more work than Ruby for doing similar workloads. :-) I know that the pros of JRuby for running Ruby applications mean things like being able to run multiple instances of Ruby from the same process, being able to run JRuby applications in a standard Java web-server be it as Servlet or a more high-level installation, and so on. Also, Java has had a lot experience in running server applications so Java does help with maximizing the use of the resources available, be it 100% of CPU time, gigs of memory, multiple CPUs, and so on. Java has those famous garbage collectors and HotSpot technologies. JRuby can enjoy all of that so it does improve things over pure Ruby. Let's say, Java doesn't break a sweat under heavy load, or at least it shouldn't. Whereas with pure Ruby all bets are off.

donal 18y ago

Sheesh, from the comments you'd think The Register is known for level-headed journalism. It is a snarky, piss-taking, grease-trap that mixes news with commentary with little to no discretion or fear of violating "journalistic integrity." Once you understand that, it becomes a great source of news and entertainment.

jrockway 18y ago
Once you understand that, it becomes a great source of news and entertainment. Or rather, a great site to ignore.

nir 18y ago

Carpenter jilts saw for hammer [EDIT: dear downmodders, the intention here is that languages are tools, and you pick the one which fits your current needs best. What's good for Twitter isn't necessarily best for another app, and Scala <=> Ruby is meaningless]

alecco 18y ago
HN is getting lamer than ever with this downmodding of anybody who doesn't conform. It would be interesting to know the overlap of opinion-based down-modders and Reddit/Digg bashers.

jpedrosa 18y ago

Seeing the April 1st date of the article it was just a little bit harder to believe they would write it like that. As folks have taken it seriously... The Ruby community was formed without being forced into it necessarily. Academics did not force people into Ruby. Businesses did not force people into Ruby. Even Ruby on Rails was created because DHH was not forced to use PHP and instead tried to make things work in this new called Ruby. Scala has its followers but Academics push it and business types can push it as well even though many business types still prefer Java and C#. Also, Scala is being primarily used for server-side stuff which is a very crowded market already and many developers are just a little bit too tired of having to interface with complex server-side stuff while trying to innovate on the client-side. Thing is, as a guy who really digs Ruby, Scala does not worry me one bit. I could always try and use a hyper-advanced Scala implementation or application in the future given I can make choices at one point and then have to revisit said choices in the future given the changes brought by new developments. Let me tell you a little story. When C# was being first introduced in its very early versions, I was very much playing Ultima Online on pirate servers. A new pirate server was being coded in C# and it was becoming rather popular quite fast and the single developer (or was it?) was having quite a lot of fun with it. Nobody told him to use C# for that kind of thing I am sure, it was just him putting his passion forward with the means he had at the time. C# has grown since then, and many pros and hobbyists use it to create all kinds of little programs on Windows. Scala? Scala has an uphill battle, and many other languages have had their own uphill battles throughout the years. It's tough.

jrockway 18y ago
Uh, who cares? Some day you will realize that programming languages are tools for getting work done, not religions.

Semiapies 18y ago

Following Twitter's issue blog, most of their problems appear database-related. I wonder whether a shift to Scala would have any real effect.

cosmo7 18y ago
Threading.
- Semiapies 18y ago
  Hmm, I could see that. I just wonder how many of their problems actually come down to thread issues. May just have to wait and see whether their new "beautiful code" does any better. :)

cosmo7 18y ago

Although the Reg sensationalizes the story, it's interesting to see how Ruby is in limbo. How much damage has been done to Merb by the 1.8 to 1.9 fiasco?

jpedrosa 18y ago
I agree that the Ruby 1.8 to 1.9 transition has caused headaches. But the 1.9 version does have some interesting features that have been long being cooked to get to this point, and perhaps more interesting is that the 1.9 version has motivated even more developments in Ruby-land as found in MacRuby that uses the 1.9 version or in yarv2llvm that recompiles the bytecode to llvm or something. Let's say that many folks might have had higher expectations that have been hard to meet given the reality of it all. The Merb guys helped with further explorations themselves which probably helped with making Rails advance more decisively, given the promissed "merging" of the Merb ideals with Rails. Also, with things like Passenger, the deployment of Ruby met an all-time high in features.

dpnewman 18y ago

I think it's important to remember that Twitter had this problem because they were ULTRA successful to the degree of being a household name, a new cultural lingo, a game changing tech of enormous value, etc. Yes, different languages and techs for different advantages and purposes. "Just" developing a web app with models and views and controllers is enough to create the user experience smash hits are made off. Scaling issues are big, but certainly fall in the class of problems we want to have at some point.

antirez 18y ago
> Scaling issues are big, but certainly fall in the class of problems we want to have at some point. Well actually with a big of good design from start you may avoid this problem from the start with little efforts. You'll have to scale anyway but it will be a matter of buying more hardware and not redesigning the system.

antirez 18y ago

I don't understand a lot this approach. Basically the front-end is almost always not the problem, but the Db / backend is. And this should be written in C probably. If you write a queue system in Ruby and it's slow where is the news? The article title is misleading since Ruby continues to be used for its core business that is the front end.