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Comment by Existenceblinks | Hacker News Reader

I wouldn't be surprised if they swap out liquid and its json based layout config .. despite they keep saying everything is doing great. New gen developer probably got gaslit by React vibe and demands change (admittedly I made this shit up)

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This acquisition is very much in the context of https://hydrogen.shopify.dev/roadmap/#first-quarter and https://github.com/Shopify/hydrogen - Shopify very much wants to move to the modern era.

And to address your point, it's not gaslighting to say that React enables interactions that would be essentially impossible if restricted to server-side templating. But there's certainly some degree to which trendiness and a desire to attract developers into their ecosystem is driving this as well.

Remix approach which is Shopify is going with is having data loader code separated from client side code. So it could be .. Solid.js or vanilla.js that enables the interaction part. It's always has been this way, this time it's just writing html renderer in js.

FWIW: Tobi mentioned that if he had to do it all over again, he would still build the admin and business logic of Shopify in Ruby on Rails, but would probably build their liquid rendering in Rust or something like it

https://twitter.com/tobi/status/1585459224506671104?s=20&t=0...

Probably only because that's what he's familiar with. Rails has the most ubiquitous scale problems that large co's keep migrating away from, and new devs are trending away from it. Shopify investing into the JS/TS backend world is just another domino falling of Ruby/Rails descending into Perl-like prevalence.

They are spending tens of millions building a ruby JIT so I am not sure you are painting an accurate picture here...

So they recognize they're having problems with speed. Dropbox also spent years trying to JIT Python faster with Pyston, and were unsuccessful. They now are leveraging Rust and Go instead.

how do you keep up with developments like this? I suddenly see how interested I am in what stacks companies are using and more so what are they going to be using in the near to mid term future.

For trends:

StackOverflow Trends: https://insights.stackoverflow.com/trends?tags=ruby%2Ctypesc...

GitHub Star History: https://star-history.com/

NPM trends: https://npmtrends.com/

For specific co tech stacks:

Tech Co migrations: https://github.com/kokizzu/list-of-tech-migrations

https://stackshare.io/wikipedia/wikipedia

https://builtwith.com/

Company GitHub page

And HN in general, like surfacing this Shopify acquisition.

I imagine following the tech blogs of certain companies - you can read about dropbox's engine rewrite here - https://dropbox.tech/infrastructure/rewriting-the-heart-of-o...

What you just said doesn't change the fact you painted an inaccurate picture. Will Shopify ditch Ruby one day? Maybe...not likely imo but maybe. For now there's zero signs they're doing that. They're investing tens of millions of dollars in Ruby as I said ... I looked at their JIT team and these guys don't come in cheap. I have no idea what this Remix purchase means but I find it hard to believe it's about rewriting everything in JS.

As for the JIT progress here are the stats https://speed.yjit.org/. I think they've been working on it for around 1.5 years they're definitely not done. Its not fantastic yet but almost 40% faster is nothing to sneeze at. If JS became fast why can't Ruby or Python? What you said about Dropbox is interesting, why is Dropbox the ones making the effort? They are not that big. There are huge companies running millions of lines of Python code - Instagram is a Django app and Google probably has a bunch of Python. I'd expect these companies to make the effort ...guess there's no economic incentive yet.

elixir/phoenix gives you a lot of the same productivity as rails with vastly higher performance. the big benefit to rails these days is the massive ecosystem of drop in gems.

Modulecounts.com shows Ruby gem output grinding to a halt. As Ruby's popularity declines a lot of gems will be unmaintained. It's a shame as I rate Ruby my favourite language after Clojure.

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