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Comment by zukzuk | Hacker News Reader

Why would it not being Ruby-based be a plus? Go is a big improvement over Ruby in some use cases, like where performance or concurrency is important, but this is not one of those cases.

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Personal opinion, I'm sure many will disagree, but I've never been a fan of Ruby. It tends to be slow and, at least last time I used Puppet, there was a lot of dependency issues (from downloading them, to ensuring you run the right version of Ruby among other things). Whereas with Go downloading a single binary takes a whole lot of headaches away. Sure concurrency/performance won't matter much in the case of Puppet like software but depending on a single binary vs lots of dependency is a huge bonus.

Rails is often slow. Ruby's plenty fast though. Puppet was trying to do a lot with the way that it was designed and I think it's probably a side effect.

Ansible can be plenty slow at time too.

Rubygems is slow, the way that it requires files from libraries is by scanning through every gem, for every file, every time. Which is particularly brutal on Windows. It probably doesn't need to be that way via either extending the syntax to require from a specific gem and/or to have a file manifest database (and lose some manual hack-it-up-itude)

> Ansible can be plenty slow at time too.

Yep, I've never been a fan of Ansible. Beyond that slowness of it, the fact that it's duct tape of YAML and shell with randomness and a sprinkle of YAML craziness make it really hard for me to like it.

Fwiw, despite all that I still prefer it to the alternatives because it doesn't require an agent and is easy to use anywhere you have SSH access. So whether it's officially part of the agreed upon tools or not, I can still use it to make my own life easier vs raw SSH.

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