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What About Rails?

334 points · 236 comments · jrochkind1

  1. meerita · · focus · HN ↗
    Every piece of software has an expiration date. You can extend its lifespan, but technology keeps moving. What was considered standard on the backend five years ago may look completely different today. I think that's a good thing. Rails worked extremely well for its time, especially around 2007–2015, but it started to show its age as newer, more capable languages and runtimes matured.

    We should be celebrating the fact that we can now port almost anything with far less effort, or modernize an existing stack to meet today's performance expectations, requirements, and engineering standards.

    1. rebelidealist · · focus · HN ↗
      What are the newer more modern frameworks? How are they better than Rails?
      1. meerita · · focus · HN ↗
        Well, you have these:

        - Rust: Axum, Actix Web

        - Go: net/http + Chi, Echo

        - C#: ASP.NET Core

        - Java/Kotlin: Spring Boot 4, Quarkus

        - Elixir: Phoenix

        - TypeScript: Fastify, NestJS

        - Python: FastAPI, Django

        1. dysoco · · focus · HN ↗
          But they fill different niches, there's no way I'm going to choose Rust+Axum as much as I love Rust for an ecommerce/CRUD vs something as batteries-included and expressive like Rails or Django.
          1. meerita · · focus · HN ↗
            Sorry, but I need to know what makes Rust+Axum non-niche for ecommerce/CRUD.
            1. dgroshev · · focus · HN ↗
              Fragile boilerplate.

              I love "Zero to Production in Rust", but that's a pretty long book that recreates a fraction of what comes out of the box with Django. Also, when things come with Django, there's no need to maintain or worry about subtle yet crucial bugs.

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