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Comment by stephenhuey | Hacker News Reader

Maybe because their codebase still serves their use cases very well?

And perhaps they have little to gain and possibly much to lose if they ditch it?

You didn't say much in your question, so I don't know if you feel they ought to rewrite with a popular SPA framework or use something like Elixir Phoenix, but if their Rails-based solution handily serves 30 million users, why do you feel so strongly they should move to something else?

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Nothing wrong with Rails, especially if the team knows it well. Time to develop is the real cost in software most of the time.

If Github wanted to integrate a lot of real-time features, then Elixir + Phoenix can't be beat. Depending on what they replace, a 10x in performance and a fraction of the servers needed is a nice win.

I've seen performance boosts closer to 20x when I've helped companies rewrite their Rails products in Elixir. I've also seen a reduction in server costs. In all fairness though, simply rewriting the Rails app in Rails, with the benefit of hindsight, probably would have resulted in a performance gain too.

I would bet $10 the scaling problem with Github would properly have more to deal with Git than Rails itself. Switching to Elixir wouldn't really help.

Because Rails is too dynamic for such a mature company. Move to a statically typed language thats not bounded by a GIL. Or multiple languages that serve the right purposes for the right job.

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