‹ BackHN Continuity

Thread

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. jamesgeck0 · · focus · HN ↗
          There are some baffling picks here. Several of these are super barebones minimal frameworks that doesn't have even a faction of Rails capabilities.
          1. stickfigure · · focus · HN ↗
            And yet people build sophisticated apps with them anyway, because there are plenty of components you can bring in piecemeal in any language ecosystem. You can even do this in Ruby without Rails.

            By way of example, "react doesn't have a router" hasn't stopped it from becoming the dominant frontend framework.

          2. rglynn · · focus · HN ↗
            I think a lot of commenters here have no idea what Rails actually is, what it solves for, or why its good.

            Their perspective is "Rails? Isn't that like, super old??"

Open on Hacker News to reply ↗

Unofficial Hacker News client; not affiliated with Y Combinator.