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Comment by milo_im | Hacker News Reader

Fun story from Gitlab:

When our Co-founder and Engineering Fellow Dmitriy Zaporozhets decided to build GitLab, he chose to do it with Ruby on Rails, despite working primarily in PHP at the time

GitLab CEO Sid Sijbrandij thinks his co-founder made a good choice:

"It's worked out really well because the Ruby on Rails ecosystem allows you to shape a lot of functionality at a high quality," he explained. "If you look at GitLab, it has an enormous amount of functionality. Software development is very complex and to help with that, we need a lot of functionality and Ruby on Rails is a way to do it. Because there's all these best practices that are on your happy path, it’s also a way to keep the code consistent when you ship something like GitLab. You're kind of guided into doing the right thing."

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And yet, when I think of gitlab I think of the insane resources it consumes and the slowness of the system even when you overprovision by a factor of 2 on cpu.

Not saying I dislike gitlab, I actually really like it and we use the on-prem gold edition licensed to 6k seats. (as in, I put my money where my mouth is when I say I like it)

But of the things people complain about regarding rails that's that it's: large, heavy, slow et al.

All of those points carry directly over to gitlab and are the biggest argument against using the product.

I believe github onprem gets around the speed by using jruby? I’m sure that could be done with GitLab as well.

I just realized I've never actually seen on-prem Github. GitLab on the other side is everywhere, especially thanks to the Community Edition. I've never seen really big deployments, but for instances with 100-200 people on board there was never any problem (and DevOps guys sit right next to me, so I would probably hear something).

As for the hosted solutions, IMO both GitLab.com and Github.com are pretty slow. I've just recently started using non-premise solutions of both and Github slowness is really taking it's toll on my patience.

Guys, JIRA cloud is terribly slooow...

Sure, but that's an indictment of Atlassian products, not of Java for web.

For context: Ebay, Amazon and Google (Plus, Talk) are using Java for web. None of those are what I would consider slow.

If people were condemning Java for web as being slow, and Atlassian used Java and was slow, then you could reasonably assume that the reasons are correlated.

That is the case I'm making about Gitlab and RoR.

EDIT: you're mentioning Jira Cloud being slow, but we have the on-prem version and it's also very slow.

I have my doubts. From my experience, JRuby is generally slower. Source: used it in production at a billion dollar company, benchmarked it personally on individual items, contacted core devs when it was slower for advice.

Ruby allows optimisations in C for critical parts. In that sense I'd pin gitlab issues less on the language or framework, and more on a lack of resource to cover the weaker points.

I say that having seen a ton of PHP code base that is not stellar in itself, but has the more critical parts well optimized, going through external C libraries or DB hooks on parts that really warrant it.

Is the CEO really the best person to ask about such in the weeds details of the codebase, like how the choice of web framework is working out? The CTO seems like a much better choice but even they might be too far removed, I’d rather hear from a sampling of engineers and tech leads that are actually coding and solving technical problems in the app every day.

Well - you can visit their blog or even go to GitLab's repos and see the discussion there :). https://about.gitlab.com/blog/

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