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0 pointsMikeb854y ago0 comments

How so? Ruby just released a new version with a JIT and new concurrency model. Rails is releasing a new major version later this year with a bunch of great improvements. Shopify, Stripe and others are putting a ton of improvements into the Ruby interpreter. Many large tech companies still use it. Many startups still use it. If nothing else, it's still a popular scripting language.

It's not as 'trendy' as it once was, but it's better than ever and still widely used.

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Zababa4y ago

> How so? Ruby just released a new version with a JIT and new concurrency model. Rails is releasing a new major version later this year with a bunch of great improvements. Shopify, Stripe and others are putting a ton of improvements into the Ruby interpreter.

Do all of these make it faster than PHP?

joelbluminator4y ago

> Do all of these make it faster than PHP?

We'll need to look at it a year or two from now and compare oranges to oranges; the new Ruby JIT (YJIT) is optimized for real world web apps, not for some artificial fibonacci benchmark. Shopify is using benchmarks on actual Rails apps like their store front to see the improvement (https://speed.yjit.org/). If I had to bet I think yes Shopify is serious enough about this to make Ruby faster than PHP - who is working on PHP internals now - Zend? In the end it's mostly a question of how much resources you throw at a problem.

Mikeb85OP4y ago

Is speed the only measure of a programming language?

Honestly, I have no idea how it compares to PHP. If I wanted truly fast I'd use a compiled language. The point is more that Ruby is still being used and improved upon all the time; far from 'dead'.

mgkimsal4y ago

> The point is more that Ruby is still being used and improved upon all the time; far from 'dead'.

Exactly the same with PHP. The handful of Rails devs I know bemoan the fact that fewer shops are growing their Rails/Ruby use. I did a stint at a shop that was mainly PHP, but they migrated most stuff to a combination of node and python, because "they couldn't find php developers". While it was sort of true, they couldn't find affordable php devs to work with the legacy mess (which was only 5-6 years old), and it was cheaper to have less experienced (but more) node/python folks come in and rebuild distinct bits of the older PHP stuff (at least, that was my understanding as an outsider - this happened after I left).

Some orgs are moving away from PHP - others are moving towards it. Same with Ruby, although I don't see as much movement toward Ruby as I do with PHP. But I do also see orgs moving away from each.

detaro4y ago

Ok, so similarly "dead" (or not) as PHP.

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