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Re:Shopify invests in research for Ruby at scale by 0x008 on Monday May 16, 2022 @03:19PM (#31402066)
Because management want's to "get things done" and quickly "evaluate ideas", a dynamic and somewhat loose language is actually an advantage in prototyping. Also it is very easy to find new developers than for example if you'd use rust, because you can just hire any frontend dev.

tooling can be built with money and money is usually not the issue for these companies.

Re:Shopify invests in research for Ruby at scale by pizza234 on Monday May 16, 2022 @04:21PM (#31402711)
Splitting services and porting them to a faster language doesn't prevent prototyping in the main, slower, language (in this case, Ruby).

It also doesn't need to be microservices madness - see GitLab (and also GitHub, but I think they don't open source their internal services), which rewrote some parts in Go.

Re:Shopify invests in research for Ruby at scale by pjmlp on Tuesday May 17, 2022 @03:16AM (#31407027)
Dynamic and somewhat loose language doesn't preclude not having at very least JIT support out of the box, even BASIC was better in that regard.

And if we take into account Ruby's predecessors, Smalltalk, SELF, Dylan.

Re:Shopify invests in research for Ruby at scale by rileyphone on Tuesday May 17, 2022 @05:51PM (#31416709)
SELF was really fast, at least as claimed [0] - about half the speed of optimized C and quicker to compile. It was where the HotSpot tech for the JVM came from, and V8 uses a similar object model and thus techniques. Just wish they could have made it usable!

[0] https://bibliography.selflanguage.org/practical.html

Re:Shopify invests in research for Ruby at scale by igouy on Wednesday May 18, 2022 @12:18PM (#31424587)
afaict Self and Dylan were research projects / product development projects.

Smalltalk had multiple commercial implementations and was used to build mission critical software in banks and utility companies and manufacturing companies and…

https://www.davethomas.net/papers/ubiquitous1995.pdf

Re:Shopify invests in research for Ruby at scale by pjmlp on Thursday May 19, 2022 @03:16AM (#31431657)
Apple sold Dylan to Harlequin, which sold it as a DylanWorks for some time.

Smalltalk still has commercial implementations, like Cincom.

https://www.cincomsmalltalk.com/main/

Re:Shopify invests in research for Ruby at scale by carlivar on Monday May 16, 2022 @03:40PM (#31402287)
Precisely. Twitter is a great example of this. I'm sure they have moved beyond Ruby in many areas but it was originally core and got them off the ground quickly, I presume.
Re:Shopify invests in research for Ruby at scale by kaba0 on Tuesday May 17, 2022 @05:33AM (#31407984)
Isn’t twitter running on Scala with Graal nowadays?