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Comment by favadi | Hacker News Reader

Why the language matters here?

I don't know on what depends, but I run a small Discourse forum... and I can tell you is a major PAIN!

I'm not a web developer (I develop mostly firmware) so I'm not into all this kind of stuff, but I know it is written in Ruby and runs in a Docker container.

It requires at least 10GB just to be able to install and 20GB just to update once in a while. It takes ages to compile. It's a PITA to update. Plus docker gets stuck with old images (not sure it's the right term) and you'll have to manually clear them.

20GB!! It's a freakin' forum software!!! Some triple A games are around 8GB.

I'm glad someone is asking for alternatives. I think all this overhead is because maybe redistributing a Ruby website it's a PITA and requires a full environment installation. And hell yeah I believe a simple test suite can take 10 minutes to run in that poorly conceived environment.

It surely doesn't requires 10GB, although it does require a significant amount of space in Multiple GB due to the way it works in Docker.

May be something could be done to the base image.

Or just try running ./launcher cleanup

I don't want to seem rude, but to my ignorant eyes and those of its users, it's a forum software that requires a 10GB hard disk to install, and 20GB to update. I know that there will be a lot of technical details that will justify (or not) why, but, hey, that's a lot for a forum and there is no sane alternative way to install it.

I've found that I'm not alone: https://meta.discourse.org/search?q=disk%20space

There are entire pages of users complaining about the same or related problems.

At the end of the day, it's (almost) free... so what are we complaining for?

I know. It surely sounds silly, but my guess is that instead of having to troubleshoot thousands of different possibl configuration with different dependency and OS library. The way it is currently distributed is not just "forum" software, it is the whole OS + Database and All other Software required along with Backup etc.

Because of the performance, size, and ease of deployment.

I wonder what annoys the Discourse team more: actual problems with Ruby, or discussions of how much better language X would have been compared to Ruby. I think Sam made a goode point on this sub-thread; the maturity and overall health of a project are more important than what language it uses.

(Disclosure: I did a few small contributions to Discourse a few months ago, but never got more deeply involved than that.)

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