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Comment by holstvoogd | Hacker News Reader

There are different fully concurrent ruby implementations: truffleruby, rubinius, jruby.. they all suck at what ruby is most used for, running rails. Last time i tried cruby was 10x faster still.

So in practice we glady throw more memory and processes at the problem.

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I wonder what percentage of Ruby is rails... I have been using Ruby pretty much every day for work since 2005, and haven't done any rails since 2009. Wonder if I am that much of an anomaly.

What are you using Ruby for?

I have used ruby since 2013 and started on rails but quit using rails in 2015. I still use ruby all the time though, mostly for scripts/automation that violate my rule on bash v. other lang for scripts (basically do I need arrays, maps, or to parse json beyond simple extractions that jq is great at). I do have a couple sinatra services now though that I maintain. Sinatra is wonderful with simple needs like mine.

I don't know how much of an anomaly I am though, interested in hearing from others as well.

Edit: not looking to debate bash vs other langs here. Of course you're free to do such below, but I won't be engaging (got to focus on work and have had the debate many times and I don't think any of us will ever convince the other. It's become religion at this point).

Also I use Elixir/Phoenix these days for use cases that used to be rails

A lot of services written with Sinatra, some developer tooling, scripts to maintain our systems.

Anything you miss from Rails now that you're primarily using Phoenix for those use cases? Elixir/Phoenix does look pretty intriguing to me, though the support universe is smaller.

What held me back so far is that a lot of simple B2B, low volume stuff doesn't seem to benefit from the high parallelism that BEAM brings.

But I'm wondering if it brings enough other advantages that I shouldn't view it that simplistically.

> But I'm wondering if it brings enough other advantages that I shouldn't view it that simplistically.

So to start with, Phoenix LiveView really is a game changer, you should have a look at Elixir just for that. This is the talk which really bluffed me when I first saw it: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=MZvmYaFkNJI.

For the other upsides, I like a little bit better the way everything is architectured in Phoenix, there's much less magic and it's easier to follow the data flow and what is going on.

Not the previous commenter. But enthusiastic :)

I would recommend trying it and seeing how you like it. I've basically dropped Python which was my daily language in favor of Elixir. I find I get a higher top bound to what I can do, high-level expressive but less magical code and a bunch of capabilities that aren't typically feasible with other runtimes (state handling, resiliency and stuff). The parallelism I get for free with Phoenix whether I try or not.

I'd watch Sasa Jurics talk on the heart of elixir and erlang to get more of the technical advantages laid out quite well.

What are you doing that cruby is faster?

I've run both Rubinius and jruby (with rails), both gave me significant performance gains.

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