Rewrite it in Rails

https://dirkjonker.bearblog.dev/rewrite-it-in-rails/

by dajonker • 2 years ago

174 101 2 years ago

dirkjonker.bearblog.dev

hakunin• 2 years ago

Dupe https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=42024246

hu3• 2 years ago

yep, 2 days ago.

I'd love to read more discussion about though.

So I'm cheering for this one to stay up as well.

chrisfosterelli• 2 years ago

Changelog had a podcast come out with David Hansson (the creator of Rails) a few days ago: "Rails is having a moment (again)" https://changelog.com/podcast/615

I'm not a particular fan of Ruby itself but I can appreciate the value that Rails brings. The interview with DHH was quite interesting... DHH is not someone I find I've always agreed with but his opinions nonetheless always seem reasonable and thoughtful. It seems useful to have someone that Zigs when the rest of the industry Zags.

mgkimsal• 2 years ago

Many make the same argument about Laravel, Symfony, ASP.NET, etc.

There's a huge amount of value in having an ecosystem of components that are designed to work together, and randomly choosing "oauth X" and "smtp Y" components and trying to string them together, vs using a battle-tested and supported stack, just invites a lot of hurt.

If you have a team of Java web app devs, having them build a web app in Rust or Go will be incredibly costly and inefficient. It seems very obvious to me, but I still get people that say "oh, it's not that hard - library X can do all of that other stuff"... but inevitably it can't. And the communities of people doing web app stuff in (Rust, Go, Scala, etc) just aren't big enough to provide the community support other frameworks provide.

Kudos to the author for their epiphany.

eximius• 2 years ago

This is basically the outcome of not having fulfilled this: https://ntietz.com/blog/rust-needs-a-web-framework-for-lazy-...

I am unapologetic about despising Ruby - Rails is pretty darn good, though. The Rails and Djangos of the programming worlds are critical for many teams that shouldn't be building their own frameworks from scratch (for any number of reasons).

Attempts are being made (https://loco.rs/) and time will tell if Rust can put together a compelling story for this use case.

Daishiman• 2 years ago

100%. Python and Ruby are used for web dev because of Rails and Django, not the other way around.

There's no reason why Rust can't have its own Django. And the day it does I might switch to it for my new web development gigs. In the mean time having access to all my tools with a promise of stability and uniformity will beat the convenience of any one specific language.

physicsguy4• 2 years ago

I like your article, a big thing I think you miss though is 'database migrations' which I think Django does brilliantly well at managing for you.

henning• 2 years ago

This isn't really an argument in favor of Rails so much as it is an argument against being indecisive and scattering your efforts too widely.

wkirby5• 2 years ago

I spend a lot of time each year evaluating frameworks for our clients and their projects, and I keep on coming back to rails.

Does it turn into unmaintainable spaghetti code after a while? Only if you let it. It's typically caused by developers, not programming languages or frameworks.

After running a number of rails applications in production for going on a decade, this is really hard, and I find it to be one place where rails (really ruby) doesn't help much.

Of all the languages we work in (and it's quite a few), ruby has the worst support for modern language tools: the LSP implementations are weak, and don't play well with containerized development environments. Typing efforts are fractured, and the official way is... well.. it's bad. This is exacerbated by ruby's tendencies towards "fluent" interfaces, which is actually code for lots of methods that take undocumented hashes of arguments --- and hash access with strings and symbols? nightmare fuel.

But I still come back to rails. It's productive, it's fast enough, it scales just fine, and perhaps most importantly there's a "right" way to do just about everything your web application will ever need to do: background jobs, websockets, read-only database replicas.

All in all, its still my recommendation for new web projects going into 2025.

sodapopcan• 2 years ago

and perhaps most importantly there's a "right" way to do just about everything your web application will ever need to do

A good chunk of chaos in Rails apps is caused by people who either insist they know better than the out-of-the-box solutions, or they “just prefer it my way.”

cpursley7• 2 years ago

The biggest issues in Rails come from trying to do things with the ORM that should be done in the database.

PittleyDunkin5• 2 years ago

the extensive use of method_missing doesn't help either.

runjake• 2 years ago

Does it turn into unmaintainable spaghetti code after a while?

I say this genuinely enjoying JavaScript programming, but my mind immediately jumped to "as opposed to immediately, like most JS frameworks?"

wkirby5• 2 years ago

I do find 6-month old typescript to be easier to return to than 6-month old ruby — same goes for most typed languages. The reality is, though, that the benefit of strong types isn't so much in giving you compile time errors as it is forcing the devs to document their method signatures.

skipants2• 2 years ago

I agree with you on all your points but I came to the conclusion that I would _not_ start a new app in Rails for those reasons.

I've spent my whole career on Rails and I think it's amazing when starting small but mature applications are a nightmare to refactor. Every monolith Rails app feels like it hits tech bankruptcy after ~5 years.

codesnik• 2 years ago

"tech bankruptcy"! this is a VERY strong sentiment. First of all, I've never seen a rails-based company which has it problems from tech department, and not from product market fit or whatever, and that's in a 18 year carreer. I'm singlehandedly refactoring right now a 10-yearish rails app which had a period of neglect and bad contractors who broke every single test, and it is still very much manageable.

dnh442• 2 years ago

Over a decade ago when Rails was the shiny new thing I wrote an online ordering system that batched received orders then sent out orders to suppliers for whatever the customers ordered. It was easy enough to get the app setup and it didn't often need any new features but I remember really struggling to get it up to date and working with each new rails version. My memory is clouded by both time and my inexperience at the time but even though the app was "done" it never actually felt finished because I felt the need to continually update to the new version of rails just in case I did want to take advantage of of the new features in newer versions rails.

Anyway over 10 years later now and I find myself writing an API and my initial thinking was to return to rails but then I remembered the bad experience (which was probably my own fault I acknowledge).

Now I find myself writing this API in Rust because the ethos that an app can actually be done is attractive to me. It's taking me longer to write but hopefully I've made a good decision!

RangerScience2• 2 years ago

Rails, ironically, doesn’t keep you in the rails. I’ve seen a couple of the things you’re talking about, and it’s really just mediocre devs in bad (but common) situations.

If someone gives you a paint-by my-numbers page, and you just scrawl all over it… is that the “fault” of the page?

wkirby5• 2 years ago

I think the context here is super important: I run an agency, and a lot of our clients are small startups or solopreneurs. The most important factors in determining their tech stack are (in some order):

* Time from idea to deployed solution * Ease of pivot * Ease of finding other devs who can take over

If I were a staff engineer at a large company with an existing tech stack tasked with spinning up some new internal microservice, I'm probably not choosing Rails.

But if I'm truly greenfield on a strict budget, still searching for product market fit? If that application ever truly outgrows rails (and it can become wildly successful without doing so --- look at stripe, instacart, github, shopify) then we've already won by surviving long enough for rails to be the problem.

JohnBooty• 2 years ago

    This is exacerbated by ruby's tendencies towards 
    "fluent" interfaces, which is actually code for 
    lots of methods that take undocumented hashes of 
    arguments

Well, I hate this too. I've been away from Ruby for 18 months but my impression was that the community has been moving away from that for a long time and toward keyword args (or whatever they're called, I forget)

    and hash access with strings and symbols? nightmare fuel.

What's the alternative? I like hash access with symbols. Prevents typos and the string values for the hashes are interned AFAIK.

    After running a number of rails applications in production 
    for going on a decade, this is really hard,

I don't feel that Ruby is worse than other languages I've used extensively (Ruby, Python, JS, C#) in this regard.

The issue is one's apps dependency graph. You keep dependencies flowing in one direction. Or you do not and you get spaghetti. I have not worked with languages that are really better or worse at this.

To take the example of a typical Rails app: it's very easy to add code to your Model A that depends on Models B, C, and D. Do that in a few models and...boom! spaghetti! Rails does not discourage or warn about this in the slightest.

It's relatively easy to avoid: have a rule that "no model can contain a reference to another model. if you have to do a thing that involves two models, put it in a service class" or some such. Of course, nobody ever does this.

Are there languages and frameworks that encourage/enforce The Right Thing in a more active way?

wkirby5• 2 years ago

Are there languages and frameworks that encourage/enforce The Right Thing in a more active way?

I don't think so, as evidenced by the fact that I'm still so pro Rails after a decade of doing this. But that doesn't mean we can't be vocal about the things that still suck.

I like hash access with symbols

Oh, I vastly prefer symbol access to string access, but this is really a ruby problem, not a rails problem. The fact that I can pass `{ "foo" => "bar" }` and `{ foo: "bar" }`, and my method has to either call `with_indifferent_access` or _strictly_ enforce being called with one of the two access types is a huge footgun, because improper access doesn't result in an error, it just results in a `nil`.

bhaak• 2 years ago

Typing efforts are fractured, and the official way is... well.. it's bad.

Official way? I thought there is none.

As long as there is no support for gradual typing in the core language it will never be used outside of niche programming.

And then I have a hard time imagining that Rails would use it anyway. Unless the performance boost would be tremendous.

rco87863• 2 years ago

https://github.com/ruby/rbs

is the "officially supported" one. It's terrible, as is Sorbet. No offense to anyone involved with either of the projects, they just miss the mark in pretty fundamental ways.

wkirby5• 2 years ago

Type definitions were introduced in Ruby 3. I personally think they are terrible --- primarily because they exist in sibling type files. They are arduous to write, don't have great tooling support, and don't feel like a part of the language at all.

bradgessler• 2 years ago

This is exacerbated by ruby's tendencies towards "fluent" interfaces, which is actually code for lots of methods that take undocumented hashes of arguments --- and hash access with strings and symbols? nightmare fuel.

Keyword arguments and pattern matching have improved this quite a bit, but not everybody is using it yet. I'm not sure how much Rails is using it either, which doesn't help.

It's def a dicey situation, but improving.

Pxtl• 2 years ago

In my experience, it's rarely the serving language that causes the hellscape of spaghetti. Possibly the SQL if you've got one of those weird luddites who wants all the business in stored procs running the project. It's the JS+CSS that does it.

jimbob45• 2 years ago

May I please ask what set Rails ahead of the .NET and Spring frameworks?

tmnvix• 2 years ago

Avoidance of a proprietary MS stack is why I went with Django 15 years ago. I imagine this played a large part in the appeal of Rails at the time too.

xp84• 2 years ago

It's typically caused by developers, not programming languages or frameworks.

Best sentence in the article. I’ve worked in well-organized and reliable PHP apps, and giant buggy abortions in TypeScript. Lots of Rails apps with varying degrees of quality. Languages and frameworks can’t fix disorganization, poor architecture, laziness, or most of all, ignorance of how the Web should work (and why.)

The main predictor of how good your app will be technically, is the skill level of your worst developers + how much your best developers care (or are allowed to care, which necessarily varies with business conditions). Regardless of if you’re using trendy languages like Rust, TS, etc.

Of course, while as hackers we desperately wish for the app to be of very high quality, the sad truth is that companies who always obsess over the finest details under the hood don’t tend to perform as well financially as the ones who make compromises to get things to market faster and pivot more effectively, so I think that’s why most of us have rarely worked in commercial codebases where nothing is embarrassing.

randomdata8• 2 years ago

Of course, but the trouble remains what is stated in the very next sentence:

There are plenty of ways to nicely organize your code and you should probably spend more time refactoring.

Ruby/Rails makes this a time consuming process as compared to many alternatives. If you have all the time in the world, Rails is great, but for the rest of us that also have to think about productivity...

Linell• 2 years ago

Do you have any examples of why RoR is more time consuming to refactor than other languages?

cpursley7• 2 years ago

The problem was choosing Rust and SvelteKit over Elixir with LiveView (Phoenix) - especially coming from Rails where it’s an easy transition due to shared philosophy and even syntax to some degree. Rust is neat but complex and probably overkill for a web app. But yeah, in general - innovation tokens cost time vs what you already know.

physicsguy4• 2 years ago

If few people know Rust, then even fewer people know Elixir. That's a major concern for these types of projects, often.

cpursley7• 2 years ago

Like I've commented maybe 100 times on hn, there's more people who want Elixir jobs than there are Elixir jobs - it's not a real problem. Probably same for Rust. Especially when AI makes it so much easier to get up to speed on a new project, framework, etc these days.

randomdata8• 2 years ago

Now there is a familiar tune!

Few people know Ruby and if you ask a company whether they want to hire PHP or Ruby guys, PHP wins because there's just more people who know it.

https://board.phpbuilder.com/d/10312349-php-frameworks-which... (First example I found, but was a common trope back in the early days of Rails)

brink• 2 years ago

I've worked with Rails, I've worked with Phoenix, I've also built with Rust and Svelte. I'd choose Rust+Svelte every time. Much better experience. Rust's async is not nearly as bad as people make it out to be.

Building new Rails apps is a blast, but dealing with old Rails apps is a pain, they're difficult to refactor. New Rust apps are great, and dealing with old Rust apps is a much better experience as they're easier to refactor.

siliconc0w• 2 years ago

I do think LLMs change the game a bit. Rails is nice because of the ecosystem and how magic and expressive it is but LLMs can generate and maintain a lot of the boilerplate while they're less good at debugging the magic when it is misbehaving.

I am working on an app that has a frontend in Django and the backend in Go and when I make changes to the Go side I just feel a lot more confident it'll all work as intended. Compared with Django I keep finding myself in the weeds debugging why some random dependency is misbehaving which is difficult because python allows you to do some really heinous stuff like instantiate classes that are chosen using runtime configuration.

systems_glitch• 2 years ago

Rails still gets the job done. That's what you get paid to do -- the job!

make_it_sure• 2 years ago

Rails is having a comeback

sigzero• 2 years ago

Don't call it a comeback.

randomdata8• 2 years ago

More accurately: Cost cutting is having a comeback.

Rails was built for the last cost-cutting era, so it seems relevant again.

gardenhedge• 2 years ago

Every year rails has a comeback and the next year it needs another one

wvenable• 2 years ago

No, it's not. But it also hasn't gone away. The long tail of viable technologies is much longer than most developers realize. Technology shifts are almost generational.

malkosta• 2 years ago

Too bad you didn't choose Phoenix/Elixir. Give it a try, and never come back to Rails.

mervz• 2 years ago

Truth

necessary• 2 years ago

It seemed to me like a lot of the value of Rails came from all the batteries that are included - would you say it’s the same for Phoenix/Elixir?

jb3689• 2 years ago

If you are doing anything serious, then yes. OTP is a top tier framework for writing any sort of complex parallel/distributed processing. I’d pick OTP over ActiveJobWhatever any day. Elixir code is also easier to maintain at scale due to stronger packaging and typing. OTP’s application abstraction is genius.

claudiojulio3• 2 years ago

Forget Rails and embrace Sveltekit. All the magic of Rails can be achieved in any framework with LLMs.

theflyinghorse• 2 years ago

Really struggling to see how Sveltkit is a all similar to RoR. Sveltkit is just a frontend SSR framework lacking the rest of the goodies and patterns of a full stack framework. Sveltkit seems to be a next.js alternative but not a RoR alternative

claudiojulio3• 2 years ago

Sveltekit is not the same as Rails. It's an evolution. Plus, it's very easy to get any Rails functionality from NPM.

nop_slide2• 2 years ago

Over the last few months I evaluated django, laravel, and rails by doing their tutorials.

So far rails has been my favorite to rediscover, I used it 10 years ago and boy has a lot changed!

I was hoping to like django more since I'm a professional python dev, but django felt like I was still clobbering together libraries (whitenoise, celery, etc) and it doesn't have a great front end story.

Laravel was super slick, but I just can't do PHP. I know it's come a long way but it's just not for me.

Rails really stuck for me the most and I really like the hotwire paradigm. As a dad with limited time for side projects Rails is going to be the tool for me now to spin up something quickly.

I'm actually porting over a current side project to rails and stumbled on this magical gem called "Brick"[0]. You just point it at your existing DB then it reads the current state of the database and makes active record models in memory for you to play with. You can then eject the models and controllers into your code base, and bam you have your model layer recreated in rails.

[0] https://github.com/lorint/brick

exdsq• 2 years ago

I was hoping to like django more since I'm a professional python dev

This is my issue too!

tryptophan• 2 years ago

Django honesty feels pretty outdated and behind these days.

The webdev race has sort of left python behind.

andrei_says_• 2 years ago

One of the things I love about working with rails is the incredible ecosystem reflecting the elegance, economics, and ambition that exist in Ruby itself.

Rails brings a certain intolerance to BS - boilerplate, verbosity and in general anything that gets into the way of flow.

Scarbutt• 2 years ago

I couldn’t help but notice that he was working with two extremes, ruby and rust. A nice middle ground could have been nodejs with TS, with the advantage of using a single language throughout the project. While nodejs doesn’t have something like rails, its ecosystem is largely centered around building web applications.

cjr• 2 years ago

I'd say adonisjs[1] is the closest thing in TS land to rails. There's also sailsjs[2].

Neither are as trendy as nextjs/sveltekit etc, but those are not really comparable to rails.

[1] https://adonisjs.com

[2] https://sailsjs.com

hfourm2• 2 years ago

What about Rails and Svelte? While many people are doing things with full stack Rails, there are just as many using Rails (whether as a monolith or separate backend from frontend deployments) with modern JS.

Actually, in recent Rails versions the mistakes of Webpacker have been replaced with much more flexible gems for building frontend assets with esbuild, vite, or any other build tool.

This gives the ability to seamlessly blend the nice pre packaged rails ecosystem with the nice ecosystem of react components or other modern frontend tooling most people are using.

I close this comment with mentioning: you still may not need all of that new stuff! What does your app actually do?

richardlblair• 2 years ago

Tbh, if you're already using rails the odds that you'll need svelte / react are pretty low. Sometimes you might, and those pages can pull those in, but generally speaking you can do a lot with Turbo and Stimulus.

RangerScience2• 2 years ago

There’s actually a couple really good ways to embed React in a Rails template. Let’s you have something really interactive when you need it.

hfourm2• 2 years ago

I mean, it just totally depends on the application. It does add complexity, sure.

Turbo, stimulus, have their own pitfalls. I have worked with them a fair amount and have ran into headaches. Also, React has a massive community / ecosystem of ready made components, plugins, tutorials, etc. Turbo and stimulus are getting better on that front, but it is nowhere close, and many situations/patterns you have to figure out yourself.

Theres weird hate on React from a portion of the rails community that seems unwarranted. Probably because of some of DHH's commentary.

very_good_man• 2 years ago

Excellent article. This is why I have tied my livelihood to Ruby on Rails.

jsnell• 2 years ago

Discussion two days ago, 239 points, 219 comments: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=42024246

galaxyLogic• 2 years ago

Rewriting really improves the quality of the code-base, because it increases our understanding of it, and allows us to replace stupid designs with better ones. Using adifferent language or platform forces you to rewrite much of it, with the same or better design.

In my opinion the ionvestment is not so much in the code, than in the design.

agentultra• 2 years ago

I'm not surprised that this conclusion was reached after trying to use Rust for a web development project.

Rails' is what people are going for when they choose it, not Ruby (generally speaking... there are obviously people who like Ruby). Rails provides all of the tooling, conventions, and ecosystem needed to tackle a great deal of web development projects.

Rails is a great example of a killer application. People learned Ruby just so they could use Rails. Wanna make a bread-and-butter website, just build it in Rails. Three-quarters of what you need is available in the framework itself and most of everything else is a library that integrates seamlessly with the framework.

If you need to use a systems-level language to solve a technical problem, you'll know exactly why you need to go through the trouble. If you're using maxims to justify your choice, you have no idea. "Because it's blazingly fast," doesn't matter if -- as the TFA points out -- your most heavily-trafficked endpoint is serving a p90 of < 400ms, your team is delivering the features you need on time, and your users are happy.

I think there are lots of good reasons to use a Rust-based framework. I work in Haskell full time. I get it. But there are huge trade-offs. The most obvious one is that almost no SaaS or open-source components you use will ship Rust or Haskell SDKs. They will ship libraries that integrate with Rails.

Rewrite it in Rails

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