For shipping new products or testing out ideas, I have not come across a more optimal framework in terms of going from idea to market.
Most often I've tried Phoenix, Django and Laravel as alternatives, but all of them seem to fall short. I gave .NET MVC a shot too back in its early days, it was not pleasant.
I run a dev shop and it seems to fit really well with our business model.
Does the bloat matter in the end tho?
You can build a million dollar business on a single $20 / month DigitalOcean server to run everything with tens of thousands of users. That's what Chris did from https://gorails.com. We talked about his Rails driven tech stack on the Running in Production podcast[0].
Recently he tweeted out he generated a million dollars from his business[1].
If you can get 100ms or less p95 response times without a complicated infrastructure then the only thing that matters is the ecosystem, community and how much you enjoy using that technology. If performance is a web framework's biggest feature then I think they're fighting an uphill battle. Performance isn't that important for most applications as long as you can produce a nice feeling application that responds quickly. All modern frameworks have a means to do that. Now it comes down to how fast can you build it and how nice is it to maintain.
[0]: https://runninginproduction.com/podcast/12-learn-ruby-on-rai...
I agree rapid prototyping is an excellent point for RoR but when you need to actually evolve the project for years, it gets really tedious and hard.
So for a dev shop RoR is quite fine -- you make the project, do very little iteration on it, and ship. That works well and I've experienced it.
For longer-lived projects however, Phoenix is miles ahead. Even Rust's Rocket, but only if you are willing to invent a lot of stuff yourself (auth for example).
I can't speak to Phoenix, but I've looked into Rocket and don't understand how it can really be compared to Rails. There's so much you need to implement yourself that you'll end up spending a big chunk of time on implementing things that Rails (or high quality / well used gems in the Rails ecosystem) can provide for free. And don't get me wrong, I'd love to sit down and do that work, but my job is to make stuff work and make it work quickly, and my employer doesn't hire enough people that we can afford to dedicate that kind of time when it's already "solved" by a framework.
I tend to work on projects where the requirements change constantly, and they're never really "done." Saying rails is good for "prototyping" is not wrong, but in a world where software is always evolving, the features and capabilities that make Rails great for prototyping are also great for just day-to-day existence.
Alternatively are there some good "kitchen sink" open source projects that implement many of the typical web application features like auth, uploads, etc. ?
Companies like thoughtbot have been a gold mine of information and battle-tested practices - is there anyone similar in the Phoenix space that's worth following?
This answers your question indirectly. I’ve included a link below to Amber Web Framework, built on Crystal. Crystal is a statically typed language with the speed of C and the exact same syntax as Ruby.
Check out the video a couple screens below, and you’ll see a demo of how quickly an Amber Blog App is generated. You’ll notice their is almost no difference between Rails syntax and Amber syntax.
I would be very careful with that statement, because it's simply not true (example: no type-related syntax in Ruby).
Spring Boot doesn't tick ALL the Rails boxes (Scaffolding a backend CRUD admin interface, all of the complex templating stuff - although Thymeleaf is pretty darn good) I'd put my money on it being more maintainable a year later. Spring as an ecosystem is huge, so there's always a strong possibility someone else has already solved the problem you're trying to solve. The tooling is pretty fantastic as well. Kotlin as a language is just fantastic.
Otherwise, I'm excited to try this out. I don't really have any performance-sensitive ruby personal projects, but with time and improvements pushing this to a production-ready state this could be a lifesaver in production for computationally heavy parts of a rails codebase.
Keep Ruby as it is - slow and expressive. If you need to speed up, get faster hardware.
Why not try to make Ruby faster without changing how expressive it is? I don't think this project does that by the way - it breaks Ruby semantics - but let's aspire to make Ruby faster.
> If you need to speed up, get faster hardware.
If your code is still too slow for your required per-request latency on a top-of-the-range Xeon and your individual requests have no useful parallelism and are not memory or IO bound... where do you go from there? Where are you getting faster hardware from?
Sometimes there is no faster hardware.
There may be some benefit to ultra specialized for this project to live in still but the audience is going to be quite niche.
So if I need to speed up my Rails application on a AWS, GCP or Azure instance, you're telling me in order to increase performance, I need to upgrade to hardware that is able to take at least 4 to 6+ GB of RAM, to modern hardware on each of the servers I have to make it go faster?
Not only that it will still be slow, very expensive and an unnecessary waste of money (Given the absolutely huge cloud costs), it shows that it doesn't scale efficiently to save on costs at all. Oh dear.
This is like saying, "Can you please get a new laptop with 16GB RAM to let my hungry electron apps eat the RAM it wants?, 4GB RAM is not enough and literally causes starvation."
EDIT: To downvoters: Oh so the high overhead and heavy resources of a Rails app and upgrading your instances to new hardware and more RAM requirements is justified with the extremely high cloud infrastructure costs then? Explain your reasons if this is the case.
By the way, I don't want to see your gigantic operating costs if you're running Docker & Kubernetes on a multi-instance Rails stack.
> "a basic proof of concept"
Ruby only ever has one big ecosystem (web development), whereas Python has expanded into several.
But Ruby isn’t going anywhere, so no need to be sad. It’s still a joyful scripting language, and its community is alive and well :)
However, recently I started a project with Ruby, thanks to language servers. I’m hoping this solves that issue, but it’s too soon to say.
There’s still other issues with the require mechanism, and Ruby in general, and other languages to try, e.g. Elixir and Crystal. I haven’t been sold yet in terms of what Ruby excels at, and those languages are each different in their own right.
Now of course, there exist other simpler frameworks (a la sinatra), but when your posterchild is a thing like Rails, you can't expect people to not be burnt in the long term and still come back.
[1] https://thorstenball.com/blog/2014/11/20/unicorn-unix-magic-...
ruby has nothing to offer so it was left behind. maybe possibility to take your old code and ccompile it into C and gain massive performance will put ruby back on map, but i would not count on it. ruby was just a sillicon valley favourite pet that's no longer the case so i would not keep my hopes up for a big return.
I use it all the time and still haven't actually done anything with Rails.
The last thing I wrote in Ruby was a script to help manage my email inbox using imap.
Am enjoying the nostalgia quite a bit :)
4 year old Rails is probably fully supported on them.
In practice 99% of the time plain old MRI is fast enough for the things I do. The rest of the time, resorting to RubyInline or a C-module has usually been more than enough.
E.g. the bulk of my code for my masters that involved heavy use of k-nearest neighbour implementations etc. for pre-processing image files for OCR was written in Ruby, with only ~2-3% then replaced with RubyInline C-code to get the speed needed.
I'd take that over Crystal any day, as I don't like the places where Crystal diverges.
