You mean like 10% faster, or 10x faster?
Edit: clicked the link; it's 10%. I don't think that's going to make any difference to the perception of Ruby's slowness given that it's on the order of 50-200x slower than "fast" languages like Rust, Java, Go and C++.
One is scripting language, the other compiled, the difference is huge already there.
It is worth comparing any two languages and ecosystems if they are used for the same things, in this case -- web backends.
Anything and everything that has a web backend is a fair game for comparison.
Right I see your point, but in this case it’s about Ruby, the language itself, not RoR.
And I find that bit sad because Ruby is also good at other things like building cli apps (have a look at Metasploit for example) & gluing different moving parts together, creating your own DSL thanks to its flexible language structure.
I wouldn't say Ruby is better than any other languge though, all general purpose language could probably achieve the same result, it's just a matter of taste.
Why?
Just today I again had to do Homebrew cleanups so one recipe can install. Likely my fault, 100% sure about it, but I just need non-confusing tools in my life.
...Or I kept grooming my homemade cross-machine provisioning scripts (i.e. install baseline tools like git and a few others, and then bring my up entire environment along) and in the end it still couldn't source a script that is right there in the file system and even after I made sure it got sourced, it still couldn't find the stuff inside it... while all other 20+ such similar `source stuff.zsh` work just fine.
At one point you do get fed up. (And yes I know this is not strictly related to strong static typing; it's just one example of a thing that will reduce bug surface.)
Ruby is easy to write. And that's the problem. People tried to do too much with it. And it's early glory of including a gem that monkey-patches the core library APIs did not do it any favors either.
Nowadays I don't appreciate unbridled freedom as much. I appreciate and even enjoy constructive limitations. Truth is we can be very much like kids and should be protected from harming each other.
But yeah, that's venturing into philosophy which was not the topic.
TL;DR: Ruby is fine but is fairly limited for my taste. My needs are far bigger and they also include maximum 50ms of startup time.
I guess you touch on something why many of the discussions on HN and Internet fail to get the point across, when you could have someone in their 10s or 20s who couldn't understand it. Just like how we were told when we were young.
>Nowadays I don't appreciate unbridled freedom as much. I appreciate and even enjoy constructive limitations. Truth is we can be very much like kids and should be protected from harming each other.
It is unfortunate this line of fine balance thinking is not well understood by many, young or old.
On a side note, you can actually compare their performance here if you’re really curious. But take it with a grain of salt since these are synthetic benchmarks.
Amazon is a huge Java shop.
Twitter used to be huge Rails app with Java/Scala services.
NGINX and Passenger are infrastructure pieces just like Memcached so I think you need to understand the context here...
[1] https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Programming_languages_used_i...
We're talking about web-app, not microservices.
We're talking about CRUD with DB migration, sessions, caching, etc.
I recalled Google's dl.google.com was implemented in C++ and Brad F rewrote it with Golang. We're not talking about microservice that serves file here. We're talking about the main web application that serves wikipedia, youtube original version (they might had revamped it sometime post acquisition with web gateway and bajillion microservices), Google Search (was Java servlet), Facebook original web-app (was PHP, became HVVM/H4CK.
So yes, I _know_ what I'm talking about in terms of the context of a web-application here. Do you?
This is not just “pretend database IO” problem. This is actual cost that no business should accept on the basis of “but but but database IO (that I’ve never actually measured, but it’s an easy cop out because I read it on medium once).
“But but but developer productivity” is a myth.
That's the only thing RoR wins at: speed of delivering first MVP.
Once you get into areas where companies don't die if they can't deliver a demo next week, RoR is not at all impressive or even consequential.
Can a python or ruby dev bang out Advent of Code faster than I can in zig or rust? Sure. Is advent of code representative of a multi-year long business system where coding is 15% of the time cost at the high end? Nah.
When you look at the actual bills and where the actual time goes, spending time on optimizing the code pace of a MVP is simply not valuable. You’re saving a small percent of a small percent of time at the beginning to accept using languages that are not know for their steady state support ability.
I skip Ruby hype but I know RoR and I use Golang professionally to build microservices serving Fortune 10,50,100,500, whatever and I wouldn't use Go to build a web-application.
Golang for microservice that relies on other microservices are great (i.e. my Golang service doesn't handle authN/authZ, but another service does), Golang for monolithic web-app that has to handle db migration (yeah I know something exist), implement multiple crud objects (remember, Golang microservices typically has smaller context and challenges than a medium size web-app) is pain in the ass!
PS: cut my teeth in Java servlet/jsp, moved on to Spring Framework+GWT, skipped RoR went straight to JS and ended up in Golang for the last 5+ years. I'm not Rails worshipers but I'd probably pick Java Spring ecosystem over Golang for monolithic web-app.
Let's not act like everyone who tries Rust gives up. OK? Sure it's definitely more difficult but people are learning and practicing and the pool is slowly expanding (me included, though I am not at production-grade experience yet).
> What you gain in reduced server costs is lost many times over in developer productivity.
Are you exaggerating for dramatic effect? I'd say depending on your people's seniority the productivity loss is anywhere from -50% to -500%, which is hardly "many times over".
You absolutely do iterate slower with Rust writing web backends -- no two ways about it. But you also (a) exaggerate the multiplier and (b) underestimate the long-tail of gained productivity that a language like Rust brings to the table (strong static typing et. al.)
And even if we take into account your comparison between server costs and programmer productivity -- there are areas where correctness and speed are more important than Joe and Susan being able to crank out 17 CRUD endpoints this week. I feel that this nuance is often ignored.
> Companies who chose Rails for decades knew it was slower and more memory-hungry than rolling everything yourself in Rust or C++.
I have worked with Rails for 6.5 years and they knew no such thing. They treated server costs exactly like they treated programmers -- a necessary evil, a cost center that (currently) cannot be optimized away.
I am consistently blown away by the protected and downright pampering environments that some HN people have lived in. It's pretty brutal out there though, and somebody has to point that out to you every now and then, lest you forget it (which it seems that you did).
> They did the math and the business case for Rails was more compelling.
They did no math, except one: how easy it is to hire 5 new devs in the next 1-2 months. No other analysis was involved whatsoever. Again, I've looked from within, a good number of times.
---
I am all for an informed debate but that seems to be difficult with you as you resort to exaggerations and dramatic language.
For the record, I don't do my main work neither with Ruby on Rails nor with Rust (though I know both, or should I say I knew RoR because I haven't used it in a while now). I got no horse in the race, I am simply looking for an objective discussion based on merits that can hopefully ignore network effects and popularity. Technologies absolutely can and have won by utilizing network effects and popularity (see: Python) but that does not say much about their objective merits.
Luckily we now have company that is large enough with incentive to optimise it.
That language with C++ mindset is just... horrible.
I do appreciate Rust a lot but nowadays find myself reaching for Golang more often. I simply don't have the extra time and energy to learn the final more advanced Rust pieces in my own leisure time so I'll learn it whenever I can but yeah, in the meantime: Golang to the rescue.
Nobody does these days. Language is just a tiny piece of the whole Cloud ecosystem aside from k8s, docker, different storages (elastic, rdbms, mongo), different monitoring/metrics solution, etc.
I work for a company that is testing Rust and the complain was that the tooling wasn't there compare to Golang.
Well I don't know if this is a shallow generalization or just observation but in case it's the latter: I am a senior dev with too much stuff in my hands already, and my personal life's list of pleasures comprises of 2 items: sex and sleep. I figured that at 40+ that is VERY NOT OKAY and I am working to change it.
So yes, I no longer will sacrifice personal time to hone my programming weapons.
Or as we say here in the Balkans: "The quality of the music depends on the tip to the musicians".
Found nothing that would impress me. Ruby syntax? Who cares? Compiled and with better performance? Well, what's wrong with Golang and Rust? They do fantastically well.
I don't see what niche is Crystal trying to cater to. Other languages have better compilers and a bigger, more developed ecosystem.
Hardly relevant, I'd think at least 80% of all Ruby usage everywhere is in Ruby on Rails applications.
The performance can vary drastically depending on which Ruby framework you use, so it's not due to the language but the upper layer instead.
Note, even if Rails is the most popular framework, there is still other alternatives which makes it even more relevant to the performance impact.
So I think you’re right.
More accurate statement would be: Python is piggy-backing on hugely successful C libraries and claims big performance on their backs, IMO.
e.g. Numo for NumPy or Ruby-Polars for python polars.
But, saying that the frameworks using the language under the hood has almost no relevancy is wrong in my opinion! And that is what I was trying to point out.
I did not claim that in general sense, I said it with the context that even if Ruby got accelerated a lot then that's still kind of inconsequential because most Ruby usage is Rails.
Also I remember Rails' ActiveRecord having some pretty egregious performance footprint (we're talking 10ms to 100ms on top of DB waiting) but I hear that was fixed a while ago.
It is possible Ruby itself got accelerated a lot, okay, I am just not sure that's relevant since almost all Ruby usage is Rails.
[0] https://railsatscale.com/2023-09-18-ruby-3-3-s-yjit-runs-sho...
I work at what a company that's not particularly large. Our original API is a Django monolith that serves about 1000req/s.
While you could argue Python isn't the bottleneck, Django often is. I hear the same feedback from colleagues that work in Rails. Not only do we run into issues with latency per request but we have to run a significant number of Kubernetes pods to serve this workload. With c#, golang, java or a similar language we would only require a handful of pods and drastically cut our compute costs.
Even for web workloads, these slow interpreted languages and their developer experience optimized frameworks absolutely do become a bottleneck and claiming they don't (or that you need to be at Google/Facebook scale before they do) is false.
Everything is a tradeoff but the way I think of it: speed is a feature.
I strongly believe it is wrong to do otherwise and is a source of numerous footguns unless you invest in tracking them down.
As for EF Core - it very good as of today (has it ever been bad?). You can transparently compose your queries with `context.FromSql(...).SingleAsync()` which will use string interpolation API to consume your plain $"SELECT * FROM {myTable} ..." and make it injection-safe and transform passed arguments as appropriate. It's quite handy.
For every engineer insisting Ruby is fast enough in a situation where it is not, there are 1000s in environments where Ruby absolutely is more than sufficient, insisting it’s too slow.
You're trying to make it seem like it's a wash, because "scripted" but it's not. Node.js outperforms Ruby in every department. And it's based on one of the slowest scripting languages of all time. Ruby is a dead language in many countries.
In Canada, you would have to travel the country to find a Ruby job. And if you don't think in American-centric terms, that is meaningful.
I enjoy writing Ruby a heck of a lot more than I do writing JavaScript. I like the object model. I like Ruby’s standard library. I like the Ruby community. I like the tooling: irb is fantastic. Bundler is still one of the best package managers around—makes npm and yarn look silly by comparison.
The spec sheet just does not matter for virtually any of my work. Switching to a less enjoyable, more performant, language might make a 60ms response time average become 55ms. Who cares? That performance difference was even bigger 15 years ago, and it didn’t matter then. It matters less today.
GitHub, Shopify, Airbnb, Netflix (yes! Even Netflix!), Soundcloud, Kickstarter, etc. etc. all use Ruby today. It is a fantastic development environment when you’re more concerned with doing your job, and less concerned with performance pissing contests.
We're talking about performance because of the context, which is – there aren't the jobs to support the language's continued growth and dedication. We're talking about speed because there needs to be a defining reason to continue using a language and develop in an ecosystem that isn't moving at the growth of other communities.
If Nintendo Switch had 4 games, and they all looked like dog piss - asking why would I bother wasting time with Switch is a valid opinion.
There's also this insect-minded logic of only being a "front end developer" or "back end developer", and that mindset is furthered by languages that don't bother speaking the language of the web. If I learn javascript, I can be both - pretty much on day 1. If I learn Ruby and Javascript, great. How easy is that to do for a junior developer just getting out of school? Not widely.
You wouldn't spend so much of your time reading and writing about ruby if you didn't care about it. You'd move to things you do care about.
Ruby, and scripting languages in general, are fast enough for the jobs they get used for. When they're not they get replaced.
The 100x to 200x mainly comes from Rails.
All these micro-benchmarks shootouts means nothing either. Is anyone running a mandelbrot or pi-digits SaaS company? I'd think not.
Similarly saying Rails is slow out of context, means nothing, Rails is "slower" than Ruby micro-frameworks X because it does useful things the other doesn't like CSRF protection etc. If you don't need these features, turn them off and Rails will be about as fast as these frameworks.
If anything annoys me more than clueless people shitting on Ruby for bad reasons it's Rubyists spreading FUD about Rails.
Some use cases with small margins call for the utmost efficiency to be viable business. Some use cases just need decent efficiency and are happy to trade some efficiency for some other properties.
Many successful people and companies are happy with Ruby, can we just give them a break? Or is there somehow some moral duty to use the "fastest" language available regardless of whether it makes any kind of business sense that nobody told me about?
For Rails I often compare to it another CRUD app, StackExchange [1] using ASP.net And the easiest real world comparison with Rails App would be Cookpad. Are we not seeing at least 10x difference if not more.
Is Rails fast enough? That depends on the context. Everyone's business model is different. It is almost definitely fast enough for most SaaS cases.
Where am I denying that? Saying that one of the most dynamic language is slower than Java or Go it's such a truism it's pointless.
What annoys me is the figures quoted. I can craft you benchmarks were Ruby is barely any slower than these two, or benchmark where it's 1000x slower. So which is the correct number to quote?
> For Rails I often compare to it another CRUD app, StackExchange [1] using ASP.net
This makes zero sense. You said:
> If you compare pure Ruby without Rails to fast language like Rust, Go and Java. It is probably closer to 10-20x.
> The 100x to 200x mainly comes from Rails.
So somehow you are blaming Rails for making Ruby 10 times slower whatever that means. That is a stupid statement that you took out of your hats and that doesn't reflect any reality. Please stop doing that, it's really unnerving for the people who maintain these projects.
>That is a stupid statement that you took out of your hats and that doesn't reflect any reality.
I will leave it at that.
The recent irony of the web is anyone that implemented a web app with "slow" ruby and backend rendering now has the fastest page loads compared to bloated front-end web apps backed by actually slow eventually consistent databases that take seconds to load even the tiniest bits of information. I see the spinner GIF far too often while doing menial things on the "modern" web.
For reference:
$ units -1v '1|2 billion reqs/month / 14 servers' 'req/sec/server'
1|2 billion reqs/month / 14 servers = 13.580899 req/sec/server
But something to keep in mind. I’ve seen servers before that could serve in the 100,000 QPS range on a single instance! They weren’t written in Ruby.
I think that shim still uses ruby 2.6, I may try to upgrade it to 3.3 with yjit and see what the latency drop is, which is probably a more interesting number anyways, but again only really matters for a single caching request that only happens once in a while.
The real reason I continue to use ruby is because it's a quick way to get things done on business logic heavy web apps, but I continue to be impressed how much I can get away with using it for things it's really not known for being good at. I run into people often that refuse to use it for absolutely anything because there's a perception that it's "too slow", but when pressed I learn that they're not really working on anything that requires high performance provided by more esoteric languages with stricter memory management that is very likely nerfing their productivity unnecessarily. My goal here was to push back on that perception a bit, not to make the dns shim sound impressive.
My entire point was that Rails is not designed for this.
I first thought it's just a backend use-case, where processing 1000 records in a paginated result is common, but the parent mentions "rails", so it sounds like a frontend use-case.
On an average mobile connection, it’s maybe a second or so.
“Why would I pointlessly accept this clear case of massive technical debt for literally no reason what-so-ever?”
Rails does not present any sort of promise that go does not also present, so just saying “yeah, I’ll handcuff my app like this cause I feel like using Ruby” is, frankly, absurd.
When you ask the right questions, you never land on Ruby, and that’s why Ruby continues to decline.
Ruby is concise compared to Go though. I like Go and but when I use it I have to accept that I'll write (and debug) at twice as much code as I would do in Ruby.
If you're mostly just loading data into a large fast cache, lines of code may be a more critical dimension than execution speed.
That's how well designed Rails projects work and you get most of what you need straight out of the box.
You’re likely in one of two situations as a businesss:
* You’re a struggling startup. Development velocity trumps literally everything. Your server costs are trivial, just turn them up.
* You’re a successful business (maybe in part because you moved fast with Ruby), you can pay down the debt on that absurdly large response. Chunk it, paginate it, remove unnecessary attributes.
This is paginated (page size of 1000) and the caller chooses only the attribute they need already, thanks.
Even successful companies care whether they need to run 1000 servers or one for something.
What database is on the backend, and is that db serving cached content? What happens if you cache it with e.g. redis to avoid the heavyweight rails ORM stuff?
Do you have granular benchmarks for the db query, requests to other services, and the web processing itself (using artificially pre-cached responses from db and those other services)?
If you rewrite it anyway, might as well use something else than ruby.
The db (mysql) is not the problem in the scenario I described.
You just said the company is a rails shop, why would you force a new language on everyone who already invested in understanding ruby?
a nice ide integrated experience:
https://code.visualstudio.com/docs/languages/ruby#_debugging...
https://github.com/ruby/vscode-rdbg
https://code.visualstudio.com/docs/editor/debugging
heavy metaprogramming in any language is going to be a pain to debug so i'm not sure what you're expecting but there are tools to help. you can also call source_location on some method to figure out where things exist.
We do allow the occasional use of “send” but try to avoid it. Dynamic method definitions are strictly banned.
The link shows 13-15%.
If I’m going to give it even a second glance, I can’t be seeing “ruby 10,000% slower than Java” for measured use cases.
YJIT is an amazing technology, and together with other innovations like object shapes and various GC optimizations, Ruby is becoming seriously fast! Big Ruby shops such as Shopify [1] have been running 3.3 pre-release with YJIT and reporting double digit performance improvements.
Personally I'm really excited about Ruby and its future. I can't wait to start working with Ruby 3.3 and using it on my client's production sites...
[1] https://railsatscale.com/2023-09-18-ruby-3-3-s-yjit-runs-sho...