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Comment by gleenn | Hacker News Reader

The counter argument is that developer time can cost a lot more than that. If Rails makes me faster, my company might save a lot of money. Obviously how much it makes me a faster developer versus how much performance I pay depends on the developer and the specific application.

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I did Rails for 10 years. This is not even a trade-off anymore. You can write code in a productive language and have it be much less resource intensive out of the box, e.g. Elixir.

Your codebase is as good as your worst developer and it's quite easy to write faulty code in Ruby. The claims of any savings using Ruby are highly dubious in my experience of making lots of money being called in to unf*ck many a Ruby codebase as a contractor.

Sorry but everything is relative and we could have just stick with JVM and Java as it's super performant and you have enough developers to choose from. Picking elixir over ruby is like picking a katana when you want machete.

"Perfomant" is very relative if I care about worst case latency BEAM outperforms JVM. Elixir is about as productive as Ruby yet about 10-15 times faster. To me BEAM/OTP's features more than make up for the slower number crunching performance compared to JVM.

offcourse. every rails/ruby thread must have an elixir reply. every time.

Sorry to bashing, but that is the reality

I'm surprised we don't see more "use jRuby" replies. Most of these discussions come from businesses "already using Rails". jRuby has immediate, major improvements to performance and many codebases "just work". In my case, I just had to mess with the Gemfile a bit.

Most Elixir and/or Phoenix migrants I met came from Ruby / Rails shop [1], and those who have made the switch seems to be very happy with their decision.

[1] Probably because Elixir is Ruby-like, and Phoenix has some Rails feel to it (so I was told).

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