I don't think the speed of Rails will lead to a renaissance. Rails was very popular at one point because it allowed you to ship a MVP way faster than with the alternatives. It was also at the peak of Heroku, so the ops part was easy. These days it's not true. Pretty much every major language has a viable Rails alternative (except JS for some reason). You could argue that we've grown backwards, as it seems that deployments are harder than before, and same with building things. I think it's a symptom of the industry being dominated again by a few big players, so the ecosystems are optimized for them.

What we might see is less people moving from Ruby/Rails to X because of speed, but that's about it.

We also might see more people moving back to Rails because of speed, because as they probably know now after rewriting in a different ecosystem... it was usually their app code that was the problem.

I don't think that's true. Sure some people will do rewrites for no reasons, but they aren't usually the type to then go back to something once it has improved, since they weren't after real world metrics and improvments but novelty. Maybe a bit to try the hotwire stuff before going to Phoenix, Go, Rust or even Nim.

Haha, I should note I wasn't actually very serious they would move back. I just wanted to highlight that a lot of people have moved off Rails for {insert other thing here} because they just have no idea how to debug or analyze performance and bottlenecks. I've fixed a lot of Rails apps as a consultant, and its almost always bad DB usage (AR queries or lack of indexes) and/or lack of caching.

I do think Ruby will make a more compelling case against its peers (php/python/node). Especially against php it can win some market share since Ruby is perceived as a cleaner language. Also to this day Node hasn't come up with a big Rails like framework. It can't hurt is all I am saying, developers seem to be thoroughly impressed by this type of big corporate backing even if it means very little for their day to day usage.

> Especially against php it can win some market share since Ruby is perceived as a cleaner language.

I don't think that's how people choose languages. Ruby had a lot of momentum in the US, but never really got that in Europe. PHP is very popular here, and I think most of the time people will choose it over Ruby because that's what people around them know, and that's what popular.

Python can do basically everything Ruby can, (web and scripting mostly), but can also handle pretty much anything else. If you're starting out today, it's probably a better choice than Ruby.

> Also to this day Node hasn't come up with a big Rails like framework.

In a way, React is the big Rails-lile framework. Just like with Rails the frontend wasn't the most important part, with React the backend isn't the most important part.

I do agree that Rails and Ruby getting faster is good. Having a JIT usable with regular code is honestly great!

React offers an unopinionated path for the front end only, thats not really Rails. I agree php has tons of momentum in Europe. Its also probable some people will get sick of it eventually and hoprfully Ruby is now a more viable option. Php is the most hated technology in the last Stackoverflow survey, thats pretty bleak. But yeah I tend to agree its mostly momentum based and Python and Node ate a lot of Ruby's lunch. To me Ruby is nicer so I am sticking to where I am happy.

> React offers an unopinionated path for the front end only, thats not really Rails.

I would argue that they are close, with Rails getting less and less "convention over configuration" with time, and people focusing more and more on the frontend. They were made at different times and it shows, with React leveraging plenty of ways to not really write backend code anymore (GraphQL, things like Prisma, Firebase).

> Its also probable some people will get sick of it eventually and hoprfully Ruby is now a more viable option. Php is the most hated technology in the last Stackoverflow survey, thats pretty bleak.

Most developers don't even know this survey exists. I'm far from a PHP fan, but the group of people that use PHP and hate on PHP is a small minority of PHP users and haters. Ruby and Rails are mostly unknown in France for example, while everyone knows Java, PHP.

> To me Ruby is nicer so I am sticking to where I am happy.

That's the important part! At the end of the day, they are relatively equivalent tools and we are humans, so emotional attachment matters. The diversity and cross-pollination benefits everyone (except beginners).

> The diversity and cross-pollination benefits everyone (except beginners).

Interesting take, never thought about it like that; it always seemed terribly inefficient to me people are maintaining date libraries in 50 languages. But I guess you're right it would have been really boring if we only had one way to do things.

Usually when you're creating a new language, doing the basic (date library, JSON parsing, HTTP server) is a good way to get a feel for it. I do wish we could reuse more parts though, like a high-performance JSON parser or HTTP server.

It isn't just speed. I dont view this as a developer or engineering prospective.

Ruby Rails has always had a difficult value proposition to business / project owners. Why should you pay for a project written using Ruby Rails? Because developer likes it isn't a good argument. They want an abundant of developers to choose from, easily affordable, and knowing they wont have problem finding another developer 10 years down the road. That is why PHP and Java, despite getting zero love on HN are thriving everywhere.

They dont need to understanding the beauty of Ruby Rails. But they understand any Internet business will require accepting payment and hence should know Stripe. They will have at least heard of e-commence giant which is somehow making rounds in mainstream media for taking on Amazon. ( Whether you agree with that view or not ) And they are now a $170B market cap with a P/E of 70 [1]. Any project management or business owner would have at least heard of GitHub. And Gitlab if they require on premises / open source alternative. They would have stumble across Internet forum moving to a new and similar looking system called Discourse.

Basically they can piggyback on the success of these companies. And you no longer need to use hype to market Ruby Rails as a product, but actual data and evidence from current sustainable business. And these business are working together to invest into its ecosystem, the performance benefits are the counter argument when Ruby Rails will inevitably be questioned about its perceived performance limitation.

So may be not renaissance, but real opportunity for growth. Whether the market or community could capture on this is of course not always certain. but at least a fighting chance.

But yes. I do agree modern deployments sucks. I have always saved this sentiment from other discussion hoping when the right moment / submission I could get other's view on it. I also agree on many things have grown backwards in catering for big enterprise. Luckily in Rails small and medium enterprise are well represented by BaseCamp.

[1] I used to quibble when people say Shopify is an $200B market cap company. Market cap doesn't mean a thing without profit. But it turns out Shopify is much much bigger than I thought. They just made their first $1B+ quarter revenue in 21 Q2. They are no longer some company with idiotic high market valuation. They are real business.

Ruby is used in France, Nehterlands etc. Sure its no way near Python/Node/js but I do think its "sustainable", e.g you will have Ruby jobs there 20 years from now.But yeah php is freaking huge in the Netherlands, maybe this type of headlines will help change that.