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Comment by sosodev | Hacker News Reader

Meh, it's fine for 99% of use cases. Rails only becomes a pain in my experience if you have random, huge swings in traffic or a ton of active users with websocket stuff (mostly solved by anycable). But very few products are going to reach those limits and if they do those problems can be solved too.

Stripe, GitHub, and Shopify are the shining examples of Rails scaling in all kinds of ways without problem.

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> Stripe, GitHub, and Shopify are the shining examples of Rails scaling in all kinds of ways without problem.

As a former Shopify dev, I can tell you that "without problem" is highly inaccurate. We had lots of Rails scaling problems.

Not sure how long you were there nor which team you were on, but as someone who's still working on Shopify infra after a decade, I disagree with you.

Scaling problems at Shopify are rarely if ever directly Rails related.

The biggest challenge was always scaling the database layer, and to some extend the deploy pipeline of the monolith given the amount of people working on it.

Perhaps we can debate whether this is really a Rails-specific problem per se, but we definitely had lots of problems scaling to prevent long-running IO from saturating web/job worker pools for things like taxes, shipping rates, syncing external inventory, ad syndication, etc -- anything where we had to make multiple network calls to the outside world from a Rails thread was a big pain.

Yeah, that's definitely not a Rails-specific problem.

Stripe doesn't use Rails. Stripe's application of Ruby is far removed from your typical Rails app. A lot of custom stuff was built into Ruby to make the multi-million line codebase work as well as it does.

Haven't GitHub been moving out of rails into go based micro services? Even their frontend I think is now just react

I believe Github still use Rails for their main application. Spinning services out into microservices, even ones that are other languages, isn't really a sign that Rails isn't working for them, it's just what happens when companies scale. The company I work for is a Rails backend (React frontend) and we have some services split out into Go based microservices (eg. Twilio webhook handling has been offloaded to Go in Lambda), but it's still very much a Rails app.

> Even their frontend I think is now just react

It remains to be seen how successful this is and what the reasons were for the change. Personally I don't like it, it's less reliable and slower than before.

Stripe does use Ruby, but not Rails.

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