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Comment by jupp0r | Hacker News Reader

Where do you get the idea that the rails ecosystem is striving? I work on a big Rails monolith as part of my day job and the amount of abandoned libraries in the ecosystem and general quality of libraries is pretty miserable if compared to Golang, Java, Python, JavaScript and others.

I'm not saying it's a bad technology choice for a new company when all you need is to build a CRUD web app fast, but I wouldn't use it for anything that requires you to serve >1MB of JSON API responses or anything that requires concurrency, substantial IO, lots of API interactions with external services, low latencies, lots of memory or compute heavy computations, etc.

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Just to give you a concrete example:

We use grape-api for some of our API endpoints. I needed to set some custom cache headers for some GET API responses and was looking into gems that do that for grape. They have a list of 6 libraries in their docs [1] that they recommend.

Their newest commits were 4, 9, 9, 10, 8 and 9 years ago, respectively. This is just one example, but I would bet half of the libraries in our transitive dependency tree haven't seen any maintenance in this decade.

https://www.ruby-grape.org/projects/ [1]

Rails is *ancient* in the context of tech though, I think it's fair to criticize the skeletons in the closest while not necessarily refuting that the ecosystem is still active.

An equivalent example imo is the PHP ecosystem, which itself has been growing rapidly and thriving over the years -- but at the same time if you did deep enough you'll find a graveyard of long since abandoned frameworks, libraries, etc...

I think both PHP and Ruby still have and will keep their niches, but in my opinion they don't provide the building blocks to expand outside of their niche and grow much at this point. If you contrast that with let's say Rust, which at least has the potential to become successful across a wide field of applications.

The problem that I can see with Ruby in particular is that its niche is getting smaller and smaller as the world evolves around it. Interactions with external services that are on the critical path to serving requests are becoming more common. Interactions with actual contents of pictures and documents are becoming more common. Concurrency is a major missing building block to build modern apps compared to 10 years ago, and the answer of the Rails community has mainly been YAGNI (although there are efforts to incrementally improve things, but no fundamental shift in language or runtime design).

Brother, did you just called PHP a niche and offered a prognosis on how they might be able to keep it? :)

And then talked about Rust as it was a general purpose language that all the potential to become the top language for most programming in the World?

I’m joshin’ but seriously, PHP is HUGE and Ruby was always small even when they were loud on the internet.

Rust is a systems language currently being used as a big hammer for everything and a somewhat obnoxious community just as Ruby, then Node, then Go were when their day in the Sun was.

I’ve seen the exact template of your comment throughout the years, it fine, it belongs to this particular point in time and in your of the woods, there are more.

Ruby introduced language native fibers and actors since 3.0 and they work pretty well. Concurrency could still be better but I'm with the YAGNI crowd - unless you are building something that requires a ton of async you probably won't need it. If you do need it, there are admittedly better tools for the job.

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