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Comment by laureny | Hacker News Reader

> Twitter was in a nice position to better Ruby in terms of performance, though they chickened out and escaped to Scala.

Actually, they escaped to the JVM, and if their job reqs are any indication, they hire massively for Java engineer positions and hardly at all for Scala ones.

I wouldn't call that chickening out, more common sense.

Rails is great for prototypes and toy apps, but once you start needing scale, it's simply not up to the task.

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I work at Twitter. Actually we use very little Java while almost every service is written in Scala.

> Rails is great for toy apps

This gets said here a lot. What about GitHub and Shopify, and ...? Are those toy apps?

I'm curious too how much of each of these is still built on Rails, and how much has been tweaked, tuned and rewritten to be 'inspired' by Rails, but no longer Rails.

Good question. I would say it varies, but after all they are mostly likely not changing things dramatically, at least thats what you get from watching talks from both companies[1].

[1] http://www.slideshare.net/jduff/how-shopify-scales-rails-204...

I've browsed this discussion and I must miss something?

You seem to imply Ruby's/Rails' speed matter?

Usually, the DB is the limiting factor in most web applications, few should need to execute more than a few milliseconds of (even) Ruby per page load. That is why people use scripting languages, after all.

Shouldn't this slowdown be a problem in the ORM for this version? I'd look at access patterns for normal requests for the new Rails version and the old. How has the SQL changed?

Sure, Twitter is different since that probably is processor bound.

(Since RoR is a popular framework with lots of eyes, there shouldn't be something simple with e.g. configuring the web server, locking etc.)

GitHub is still on Rails 2.3 and has not upgraded partially due to performance concerns*

*From an episode of Ruby Rogues with Zach Holman

I guess if you wanted Scala programmers (and for the long-term, not just a 3 month contract) you would hire for Java programmers as a) there's a lot more of them so the talent pool is larger, b) teaching a Java guy/gal Scala isn't going to be difficult, and c) they may be cheaper to get (a pure guess)?

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