Product Hunt moved from Ruby on Rails to Express/Node

11 points·syscom··7 comments

Product Hunt is now based on Express/Node (source: Wappalyzer) Why ?

It seems they are very react heavy, but they also render server side for when js is disabled. I'd imagine the backend isn't an overly complex app so it made sense to just use JS everywhere

Wallmart has done it, it's for better performance because of blocking processes as far as I remember from an artical I did read in the past

But was it really necessary to switch from Rails to Express/Node in Product Hunt's case ? That's why I'm kind of surprised.

I know the CTO of product hunt - he wouldn't switch the tech stack for no good reason. They already used node ~1-1.5 years ago for some parts of the site. I'd guess that they found out that it works good for them and they switch completely over to node, which also removes some rails legacy code they had.

Not sure, but guessing that millions of tiny queries are best served with LibUV (Node's underlying asynchronous I/O library)?

Rails has just one minor version change for the last half year. Ruby is stucked also. It's becoming boring in the rails world.

Rails has become stable or "complete" therefore it does not require so many updates and fixes.

On the other hand it also makes it not "cool" and, as you said yourself - boring.

Node on the other hand has a lots of movement and updates because it still misses some critical features like async/await.

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