Moving on from Rails and What’s Next
blog.seantheprogrammer.com
blog.seantheprogrammer.com
I guess I’m just baffled by the number of people on here that I see pointing to Rust as the next project they tackle after Rails when I don’t see them overlapping at all.
Edit: The solution here[1] is a good example of what I'm talking about I think. A lot of what's there is pretty obvious to someone familiar with JS/Ruby/Python/Perl, and they might even use a very similar looking solution. The Rust specific stuff is really the only foreign stuff, so if you assume you would learn that when learning the language, it's a pretty straightforward solution that looks similar enough to be inviting.
1: https://stackoverflow.com/questions/31986628/collect-items-f...
(although looking at it again most of the content links are a bit old, but the library stuff seems current)
The Rust tooling and community are just that good. I'd rather have to work on some extra verbosity and maybe even maintain my own helper library in Rust than deal with with Elixir/Phoenix at this point. The number one reason is that Elixir deployments are nothing short of a nightmare. I've found the community not particularly helpful or knowledgeable about how things work (and given how many moving pieces are in an Elixir deployment, and how brittle Elixir deployments are, this is a terrible thing). And you're definitely not going to write CLI tools in Elixir (it straight doesn't work with escript in the first place).
Compiling down into a single "static" binary like Rust (and Go) do by default is a huge win for things like this. The quick startup time of a Rust or Go app compared to Ruby or anything JVM based is great for rapid iteration and testing. The tooling around Rust is, in general, fantastic. Being that much of a pleasure to use really makes up for how inappropriate it is to use Rust for most high level web app things.
Phoenix had a lot of promise, but these days I'd much rather go back to Rails or Django (with an eye towards how to migrate to a compiled language) if I needed to churn something out quickly.
If you run mix in production, then it's just like running Rails or Node. You don't get certain features like hot upgrades in production while keeping what's in memory on the server, but you don't get that from Rails/Node/PHP/Python either.
If you want those BEAM releases, then you have to use the Elixir (or Erlang) tools for them. I also encountered a great deal of frustration when working from a different OS, but no more than I did when building Rails apps several years ago.
Now I generally, build with Gitlab CI/CD and deploy from that Gitlab container to my server with Distillery and Edeliver. It lets me use the standard CI/CD tools and have stateful upgrades. I am running Ubuntu on the server, though:
Sure, 2 days of work the first time, which is a negligible amount of time for any real world project (otherwise you are on the wrong language). This if you want a good pipeline. Otherwise it's a couple of hours, but even with rails i always invested a couple of days to have a good pipeline.
Doesn't mean rust does not do it better, but it's really not the point for choosing a language over another. In a big project you have a dedicated person. In a medium project, the investment is very small. In a small project, you are better served by prototyping tools (rails)
If deployment was easier in the Elixir world, would you have stuck with it?
I also like Rust a lot, but I find Elixir pretty much frictionless to work in. Rust is basically you vs the compiler for quite a while. I've been using Rust for IoT work but I vastly prefer Elixir for web. And since I've been enjoying it so much I'm gonna start looking at Nerves (https://github.com/nerves-project/nerves) for IoT work as well.
Perhaps, but Elixir was a very niche product for me. I'd use it for web apps and that's about it. Even then the ecosystem was fairly immature, and I'd only really want to use it in a setting that played to the strengths of Erlang. One of the big problems with the deployments being a gigantic beast is that there are maybe one or two people who understand the tooling around it. Great when it works, really lousy when it doesn't.
With the other languages being discussed (e.g. Rust, Go, Python, Ruby, Clojure, Kotlin) I've found far broader uses. I'm not going to write TUI/GUI apps nor would I write shared libraries with Elixir. Unless escript support was implemented you simply can't write things that depend on a shebang.
There's no harm in learning it, but the key is in being able to go beyond the hype and evaluate when it's worth using the knowledge you've just acquired.
The master version of Elixir also has support for releases https://hexdocs.pm/mix/master/Mix.Tasks.Release.html
And the big problem for Elixir is that you don't see that level of mess or siloed knowledge with other languages. Say what you will about something like Capistrano, but it's an order of magnitude easier to dig into and support because it's not mashing together a variety of languages (erlang, bash, elixir). Some languages like anything JVM based (that compile down to JARs), Rust, and Go compile down into single artifacts quite easily. Others like Ruby and Python can be moved around with standard system tools easily enough.
The single point of failure is gone. The code is now maintained by the Elixir Core Team and it should garner more general attention from the community. The amount and complexity of scripts have been reduced drastically and they are statically verified to run on `sh` (no bash). As with everything else in Elixir, we do our best to keep the Erlang <-> Elixir interface pretty clean. You should expect the same level of quality and polish as the remaining of the Elixir tooling.
I am not sure about this point though:
> Others like Ruby and Python can be moved around with standard system tools easily enough.
If you are not using releases, and simply Mix, is Elixir any harder to move around then Ruby and Python? From my understanding, using Mix to run Elixir in prod is a similar experience that both Ruby and Python would provide.
I've articulated my experience in my previous reply to you, but I'll pose this response: that it's taken so long for Elixir to come up with a manageable deployment story makes it seem like deployments are an afterthought with Elixir. If things are better now that's great, but as an ops guy by trade I think that deployments are one of the most important user stories out there.
I suspect one of the reasons people are gravitating towards Rust for things it's not particularly well suited for (like web apps with a ton of business logic) is that the Rust team focuses on important user stories like:
- tooling (human readable error messages, dependency management, portability)
- deployments
- IDE user experience
These are things that Elixir and Phoenix aren't focused on. For example I still get the occasional email from github about the poor souls trying to use distillery on FreeBSD so I don't buy that things have improved that much.
There are mostly two ways to deploy Elixir. One is the provisioned approach: you install Erlang/Elixir (or you assume it is installed in the machine), then you fetch your project source code, fetch deps, compile them and run your project (in the same way you would run it locally).
The other approach is via releases. A release is a way to package the Erlang VM, Elixir and all of your application code into something you can dropped into production. The downside is that you need to match the target OS and architecture but there are many documented approaches to do so. Today the main tool for performing releases is Distillery and it has great documentation covering AWS, Docker, etc: https://hexdocs.pm/distillery/home.html
In Elixir v1.9, coming out this July, we are incorporating releases as part of the language. You can read more about it in our documentation for master: https://hexdocs.pm/mix/master/Mix.Tasks.Release.html
If you are using a PaaS such as Heroku, it is likely there is already tooling that will take care of it for you, such as the Heroku Elixir buildpack: https://github.com/HashNuke/heroku-buildpack-elixir. There is also Gigalixir, a PaaS specific to Erlang/Elixir: https://gigalixir.com/
Finally, if you want a more structured resource, there is also the Adopting Elixir book (disclaimer! I am one of the authors): https://pragprog.com/book/tvmelixir/adopting-elixir - One third of the book is about production concerns, covering deployment, performance, metrics, monitoring, etc.
If none of this works, you can always reach out to the community in elixirforum.com. I assure you there are more than 2 developers that know about deployment :) and if you still feel like none of the replies about deployment there have been satisfactory, feel free to add me to the conversation there.
> And you're definitely not going to write CLI tools in Elixir (it straight doesn't work with escript in the first place).
I do not understand this comment as Elixir works with escripts just fine. You can build an escript for your project by simply calling `mix escript.build`. This has been available since v1.0 (https://github.com/elixir-lang/elixir/blob/v1.0.0/lib/mix/li...). You can even install escripts directly from Hex (our package manager) since Elixir v1.4 (2.5 years old).
I'm deploying to BSD, which distillery does not support. Perhaps there are other people who can grok deployments on Elixir, but none of them have seen fit to (or know how to) resolve these issues. I've seen scattered reports of success in the issues, bitwalker's attitude and general willful lack of engagement was enough to get me to move on from Elixir and not look back. By the time I gave up on Elixir, deployments on BSD had been known broken for months.
I'm used to hitting speed bumps by not deploying to Linux, but Elixir was by far the bumpiest road for the least benefit. For comparison the rust community has been extremely responsive to BSD users of all stripes (incl. dfbsd).
Interesting, escripts should have worked by then. I assume this was quite some time ago, so you don't have it around anymore, but if you do recall what went wrong I would love to take a look at it. But just to put things in perspective, v1.3 is almost three years old and things have generally evolved since.
> There just aren't any killer features in Elixir that would revisit it.
Well, sometimes the killer feature is having all of that in the same package: immutability, concurrent primitives, scripts, etc.
There are also killer features (although I guess "killer" will depend on the person) that we get from running on the Erlang VM: focus on fault-tolerance and supervisors, concurrency and distribution out-of-the-box, and generally other features coming from processes and the actor model. For example, Phoenix makes an excellent use of all those features to build performant web applications with a focus on real time (Phoenix LiveView being a recent great example). Nerves uses the fault tolerance bits for building embedded software. Etc.
But who wants to sit idly and wait for three years for a language to evolve (and regress)? At what point does saying "deployments have been broken with no fix or root cause in sight, let's just sit tight and hope for the best" sound ridiculous?
Were the alternatives to Elixir mediocre I'd consider revisiting it. Were I to see an interesting opening at an Elixir shop, I'd consider it. Would I ever stake my reputation on suggesting Elixir for a new project in a professional environment? Absolutely, 100% no.
Well, sometimes the killer feature is having all of that in the same package: immutability, concurrent primitives, scripts, etc.
I get all of that with rust and I'm not tied to Linux or a petulant maintainer. vOv
I'd be careful about touting performance versus a compiled language like Rust though. Going from Phoenix to Rocket I saw a pretty dramatic speedup in the time it took to serve requests even on my simplest web app (an image gallery). Phoenix wasn't slow, but Rocket was consistently faster.
Edit: OK async on rust is still a shit show, but hey nothing's perfect, right?
That's not what I meant at all.
Look, I am not trying to invalidate your experience. Nor I am implying you should wait 3 years for things to get fixed. Nor I am saying that Elixir is better than Rust.
I just want to point out that, for someone starting with or using Elixir today, their experience may be different because 3 years is a lot for a language and ecosystem where v1.0 was only 5.5 years ago. Deployment involves many concerns and even if some particular scenarios have not evolved accordingly, you can be sure others have. The same applies to Rust and other languages, they are improving all the time.
Distillery was (is?) broken less than a year ago. Ending up in a situation where such a key component (deployments) is developed and understood by only one person for such a long period of time speaks very poorly to the oversight and development process of Elixir. Beyond that it creates a distrust that Elixir will continue to work or prioritized appropriately — deployments worked on BSD for some period of time.
The last message I got from Github from BSD user commenting about distillery not working was in February 2019. After that it devolved into "here's how you get distillery working in Docker." That's the kind of low quality engagement I walked away from, and that's the reason I continue to recommend against Elixir or Phoenix for new projects.
In this case it's about someone involved in both languages already moving from being primarily (or identifying as) a Rails committer to a Rust ecosystem committer (for which he's already written a few very popular modules over the past couple years). This isn't the usual "I tried some new language and I like it" blog post, so I'm not sure your assessment holds true, for this case at least.
Mmstick had a good post about this two months ago: https://www.reddit.com/r/rust/comments/af43dy/rust_windows_g...
I'd LOVE to see something along the lines of Qt for Rust, but I'm not going to hold my breath.
Rails to Phoenix/Elixr makes some sense. As for me, I'm moving backwards in the hype cycle. I started out with Ruby as my first programming language 15 years ago, but I'm spending more and more time in C# these day.s
That said, I agree that anything you build in Ruby can be done in Elixir and you should be able to leverage a lot of benefit. The reverse isn't true.
Doesn't it feel so much nicer to just focus on the domain problems of new tasks without relearning how to talk to the computer?
Pick platforms, not languages. But always learn what the others bring into the table as well.
When Rails 0.9 dropped in 2004, I instantly rewrote my old PHP app in it and never looked back. It just felt so expressive and naturally declarative.
Rust has a similar amount of promise, though not quite as good of a demo. The idea that you can write high-performance code without typical high-performance code bugs is amazing! There's a whole new type of type system that ensures it!
Sometimes you want your language to also be a religion ;)
> The idea that you can write high-performance code without
> typical high-performance code bugs is amazing! There's a whole
> new type of type system that ensures it!
Rust is dramatically lower level than something like Ruby or Python. But sometimes the promise of really usable dependency and project management with something like Cargo wins out over the minimalist approach that Go takes. Rust (and something like Rocket.rs) wouldn't be my first choice for anything other than smaller personal projects, but it's not nearly as awkward as PHP was before it matured... and it's nowhere near as bad as rolling everything from scratch in C++.
It also depends on your target audience. My experience has been that Rust is significantly more portable than C#, Node, Elixir, and (to some extent) Go. Java (and by extension things like Kotlin and Clojure) have a big leg up here too.
.NET is a multi-language platform, with support out of the box for C#, F#, VB.NET, C++ and many others with MSIL backends.
For instance, Yehuda Katz and Steve Klabnik were both extremely helpful and widely admired figures in the Ruby/Rails community. Then they both joined the Rust core team.
That alone is enough to attract the interest of a lot of rails people I think, by giving Rust relatively huge exposure among Ruby people.
Then you have the fact that (probably due to the above) Rust became a common choice for outsourcing performance-critical parts of Rails apps.
Once you start doing that, it’s kind of natural to start thinking hmmm what if I wasn’t even doing Rails..
Interestingly, Crystal might be an easier jump as it's syntax is very similar to Ruby, but with the performance gains that come with compiling to a single executable.
Crystal is still pre-1.0 though so it doesn't quite have the production-ready stability or robust community of Go or Rust.
However every time I've looked at crystal I've stopped because there's no windows version. I have to have a gaming PC and I only use editors and languages that work on windows mac and linux so I don't hamstring myself or anyone I'm working with.
I have a gaming PC too and I run my editor and browser etc... in windows, but I have a Linux server where the software I'm developing actually lives and runs (if it's something web based and not designed to run on windows).
I can't for the life of me figure out why you would actually run your development environment on a drastically different OS than what you're deploying to unless you absolutely have to. You're just asking to introduce an entirely avoidable class of bugs.
I have done it btw, Go software developed for Raspberry PI on windows, but I definitely wouldn't do it again.
How on earth do you use 7 monitors for work?
It doesn't matter where the JVM is running.
I have a production line of business app running on node.js in a full windows environment (cloud server and desktop) for a SME I do work for.
I'm not that familiar with Rails or Rust, but Steve Klabnik (http://www.rustforrubyists.com/) and Yehuda Katz come to mind in this case (https://blog.rust-lang.org/2014/12/12/Core-Team.html).
So all of those things overlap quite a bit (also am I not allowed to expand the scope of things I work on beyond web frameworks? I'm not really sure why they have to overlap at all)
This is the crux of the problem which seems left unadressed in the comments.
If it feels nice to enjoy those consulting rates, give something back.
I really appreciate all the contributions done by Sean in Ruby On Rails and wish him all the best.
I hope he can make a living doing open source.
I wish I had millions and could be a patron saint of sorts for people like the author. Open source funding is so broken as the companies that build upon the vast open source and often free software don’t do much in the way of donating or otherwise supporting the companies or individuals behind the projects.
> Orthogonality in a programming language means that a relatively small set of primitive constructs can be combined in a relatively small number of ways to build the control and data structures of the language[2]. It is associated with simplicity; the more orthogonal the design, the fewer exceptions. This makes it easier to learn, read and write programs in a programming language. The meaning of an orthogonal feature is independent of context; the key parameters are symmetry and consistency (for example, a pointer is an orthogonal concept).
Go modules are a fairly new feature which addresses past criticisms of Go dependency management so I don't think that's a valid criticism any more.
> Right now my goal is to get a handful of medium sized grants from larger companies to support my work on crates.io. If you work for a company that might be interested in helping sponsor me, please reach out.
If that's a financially viable proposition, that speaks well of large companies supporting individuals on open source projects, no?
I think the majority of companies that give back do so through developer time and effort. If there's a non-profit to push money through to fund work, they at least get to write it off easily, so whether a language has one like the one I referenced above might greatly affect whether there are dedicated people working on the language specifically or not.
Does anyone know if the "Rust organization" he references is meant to refer to Rust as a whole, or is a specific non-profit with a goal of funding Rust advancement? I'm not finding anything specific. Mozilla probably isn't equivalent, as I imagine only a fraction of anything donated to them could be expected to go directly towards Rust.
I spent a lot of time wrestling with the decision to even try this at all ("is it fair for me to do this when so many others can't?" and "will folks just think I'm abusing my position" are both things I had to come to terms with).
That said, if we do a better job of breaking down barriers to getting into that position in the first place, it's not a terrible model to start with. Getting a enough large grants to fully cover a salary from various companies a year is much more feasible than getting enough tens of thousands of individuals to contribute.
Working with these shorter sponsorships vs a full time employer also just feels more like the kind of open source work that got me wanting to do it full time. It lets me be much more flexible on when/what I work on (within reason, there are expectations on what "full time on crates.io/Rust" means). It's also helps to avoid situations where the employer is upset because you're spending time on a feature/bug/whatever that is important to the ecosystem but not directly useful to the company (e.g. working on a PG specific feature in Rails while employed by a company that uses MySQL)
We may eventually start a foundation, but that’s a huge “may”.
I saw the rise of Ruby on Rails; the driver was the ability to deliver wellstructured web applications fast. The language was a secondary thing.
It reminds me of what Dijkstra said about people raised on BASIC in the 70s:
> It is practically impossible to teach good programming to students that have had a prior exposure to BASIC: as potential programmers they are mentally mutilated beyond hope of regeneration.
So basically procedural > OO > functional.
I will say the hardest transitions (where "hard" is still less hard than, say, understanding everything about how a SQL join works) were from .NET to Ruby (and even THAT transition was mostly hard because I was going from "Microsoft ecosystem" to "open-source ecosystem" without having Java on my resume), and from Ruby to Elixir (syntactically similar, semantically night-and-day). But clearly it's possible... and I'm a Dijkstra fan!