Are there as many examples of the inverse, big successful companies that started off with a "fast" stack and didn't need to optimize the one they grew with? It seems like flexibility is more important than performance until you actually have a winning product.

but ruby is moving in this direction

- jit

- more functional tools

- better introspection

- sorbet

- ractor

- truffleruby, and jruby

Ruby is working hard on performance but Sorbet is hardly a common thing. The Rails community isn't gonna adopt types anytime soon imo. To be fair most likely never, at least not as a community. Some companies may go that route but I hardly anticipate a big movement.

Those are all grafted on afterwards, and they don't see too much use apart from the people who made them (ie Stripe with sorbet). Compare that to a language that has first-class support for all of these built in. As you learn such language you're forced to learn these concepts as well, so more people in the community use them, thereby increasing their effectiveness through sustained development because they're popular features.

Unfortunately, in the case of Shopify none of those tools will run rails any faster. I think they only use TruffleRuby for some internal tools.

Hopefully things will improve now ChrisSeaton is working there.

Sure, all web development should be C with some assembly sprinkles.

This is a bad faith argument, the parent is not saying to use C, but surely you can concede that there are better languages for performance and are useful for web development? Even Node is faster than Python and it's chugging along well in the web dev community.

Node is probably faster than Python but so what? It comes with its own set of problems and drawbacks. If you're optimising for performance I don't see why you would go for Node anyway, and if you're not optimising for performance than I still don't see why Node but to each his own :)

Practically every popular language is faster than Ruby and Python.

Ah yes, because C is the only fast language.

C++ is faster (due to inlining and templates).

C++ as it is written can be arbitrarily slower and may have hidden bottlenecks due to copy constructors and poorly thought out Stl usage. But C++ fanboys refuse to admit this.

*can be faster

It can also be slower :)

So can Java :)

web assembly ;)