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Comment by neonsunset | Hacker News Reader

Please don’t.

You pay 100x for each line of code and get nothing in return over ASP.NET Core or Vert.X. Pick any fast compiled language you like, don’t contribute to global warming.

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“Don’t contribute to global warming” is the silliest argument for perf bc you can use it to dismiss basically any human leisure activity. Why is it okay to use a computer to play video games but not make the perf tradeoff with Ruby?

Because there is no trade off. Rails does not offer anything over picking Kotlin/C#/F# or even Go offerings. The “productivity” is a little excuse used to hand wave away the criticism of absolutely unacceptable state of Ruby performance in the year of 2024 and all the other problems that it has.

The whole article is about how there is a tradeoff, sorry they didn’t investigate your preferred technology but you can’t expect them to try forever. Even if they had tho, are those really “batteries included” offerings like Rails?

What do you mean? Rails seems to come with authentication, session management, cookie management, an ORM, extensive logging capabilities and a bunch of other things. Go and Kotlin are languages, not frameworks, and they certainly don't include these things. So what are you comparing exactly?

My initial comment lists two great options that make choosing Rails an unconditionally short-sighted decision.

ASP.NET - maybe, but you’ve got to be kidding if you suggest Vert.x to be a replacement for RoR. They operate on completely different levels of abstraction (even ignoring nightmare of Reactive code you have to write using Vert.x).

Not a nightmare at all, if you know what you’re doing. There’s a learning curve indeed, I’ll give you that.

Maybe my impression on Vert.X was misplaced. Trying it out left me off with "Oh, so kind of like ANC minimal API with Rx.NET but faster". I should revisit this, thank you.

JVM ecosystem has other great frameworks like Active-J and Ktor. My main point is, unless that's what you're most productive in, RoR is a really poor choice for both small and large codebases and there are plenty of options that completely eliminate the classes of issues you would otherwise have to spend the time on.

Sure, I like using C# (and recently F#) a lot but it wouldn't kill me if I had to use Kotlin/Java/Go/Swift instead. All these have understandable tradeoffs and merits to them. On the other hand, my experience of interacting with advocates of Python, Ruby and Erlang is incredibly poor - it's impossible to have a technical conversation and it seems that their communities live in a bubble of belief that using interpreted junk comes with magical productivity advantages inaccessible to expressive modern compiled languages with rich type systems and excelled back-end frameworks/libraries.

Ruby really isn't that slow -- even so most of its "performance" problems are due to idling waiting for I/O not actual code.

If you care about power consumption of computing you need to be looking at current AI and crypto currencies consumption like Bitcoin…

Sure, I'll bite. Are you a Rails developer maintaining an app that actually has massive performance issues?

Luckily, our Rails app is very snappy and runs on hardware equivalent to an average 4 year old laptop. No issues with performance that I can't fix. No exorbitant power usage.

Also, as a niche business app, it will never have to scale as much as GitHub does.

You can argue that game devs also have moral obligation to mitigate impact of their games by better optimizing them.

Okay but where does it stop? Surely any amount of energy wasted on entertainment is wrong.

Why is it okay to waste energy for entertainment but not waste energy for development experience and efficiency?

Could you explain your comment more? The way I understand it is:

- I have two servers with the exact same hardware - one runs a Ruby on Rails web app - the other runs a Vert.X web app - both apps have similar features to the end users - if I run both of them for a month, the server running the Ruby on Rails app will consume hundred times more energy in kWh compared to the server with the Vert.X app - another way to look at it, to serve the same number of visitors, I would need hundred servers running a Ruby on Rails apps and one server running a Vert.X app

Is that correct?

It hasn't been my experience when I measured the long-term consumptions with energy meters in real-life scenarios. How did you arrive at your number?

By comparison, going from resistive heating to a heat pump is a 2.5x-4x jump in efficiency. 100x gains would be nothing short of spectacular.

I noticed the best energy savings when switching to Arm CPUs, but that's a separate topic.

Billionaires create more CO2 in 90 minutes, than normal people create in their lives. This whole carbon footprint is BS marketing from fossil fuel monopolies.

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