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Comment by kibwen | Hacker News Reader

As a further historical note that may interest HN users specifically, Skylight was the world's first production user of Rust (the Ruby gem they ship is written in it), dating back to well before Rust was even stable.

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Which is mainly because Yehuda Katz (Rust core member) works at Skylight.

To be clear about the chronology here, wycats made the decision to go with Rust, then did a lot of work in Rust, then became a core team member. He chose Rust because of his needs in Skylight, not because he was already invested in Rust.

https://blog.rust-lang.org/2014/12/12/Core-Team.html

> Yehuda Katz will be known to many in the Rust community for his work on the initial design and implementation of the Cargo project. He is also a co-founder of Tilde, which has been using Rust commercially in their Skylight product for quite some time

For slightly more context, I wrote the first lines of Rust code for Skylight as a spike at the end of 2013, and joined the Rust core team more than a year later. :)

I was largely inspired by a blog post in June 2013 by Patrick Walton: Removing Garbage Collection From the Rust Language[1]

[1]: http://pcwalton.github.io/blog/2013/06/02/removing-garbage-c...

Do you code in Ruby any more or is it all Rust these days? If you had to build a web app what would you use?

I split my time between Ruby, JavaScript (mostly with TypeScript) and Rust, with occasional Java and devops work. Of those, JavaScript (with TypeScript) is my predominant language at the moment, but the mix changes pretty often.

Skylight's stack is Rust and Ruby for the agent, Rails for the backend, Java for our data processing pipeline (essentially a custom data store) and Ember for virtually the entire front end. The graphs in Skylight are Ember components written in d3.

I still think that Rails is a great choice for most web apps, since (to this day) it provides an extremely productive baseline for building account management and working with third-party integrations, which turn out to be a surprising percentage of the total code (and an even higher percentage of backend code changes) in even an ambitious project like Skylight.

I also think it's reasonable to use something like Java or Rust for any heavy data-crunching your app might do, but I think people over-estimate which aspects of their application are truly performance and efficiency critical.

Interesting. I see, thanks. From your list Ember stands out, was not expecting that. Rails and Ember integration looks painful? Maybe using Rails 5 and API mode is the way to go.

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