> Great for CPU-intensive tasks.
Ruby is among the slowest languages out there. Which is fine for most webapps, but calling it great for CPU intensive tasks... I don't understand what logic is being used to come to this conclusion.
I think it's only in comparision to php, python etc.
Ruby 3x3 is a thing (make Ruby 3.0, 3x faster), and Ruby 2.6 is said to include an optional JIT compilation mode.
I haven't seen any benchmarks or analysis that say JIT is ready for production use, but indications are strong that the next version of Ruby will include a lot of surprising things, like maybe a type system?
Ruby got a reputation for being slow very early on, and my understanding is a lot of that was due to slow code in Rails (version 2 and/or 3?). Rails is a lot better now. Ruby continues to evolve. Still, I don't know how many Ruby developers have chosen it for reasons owing to CPU-intensive work. This does seem like a stretch, even if we are beating Python in some benchmarks.
I was listening to a recent interview with DHH and he makes a great point that Rails and Ruby are about optimizing for developer happiness and dev speed. Computing power keeps becoming cheaper and ruby keeps getting faster but developer's salaries continue to be the number one cost for software companies.
100% agree. Developer happiness, conceptual compression is another important concept that DHH likes to talk about. If there's a hard topic that devs need to understand sometimes, Rails makes it a point to guarantee that devs don't need to understand all those things all the time.
Conceptual compression means that you can unpack those ideas and work with them when you need them, or pack them back up and don't pay attention to them when you don't need them.
The biggest example that I can think of is ActiveRecord. I can't tell you the number of times I've seen presentations by programmers who work with other frameworks like .NET, who have embedded large, complex SQL queries into their code. They don't think twice about it, don't even flinch, parsing SQL is part of the cost of doing business in this language.
Just a disclaimer, I work with Rails every day, but I don't really like it all that much and I really don't like ActiveRecord. We have Rails legacy apps and I maintain one of them. I'd still use Rails for some things, but it I'm pretty picky about what I think it's good for.
Having said that, it makes me a bit sad that there are quite a few developers who actively avoid SQL. Granted the syntax is absolutely awful, but it is a very useful and powerful language. The concepts behind relational databases are embraced by SQL in ways that I can't imagine in any other language (I'm sure there must be other good relational query languages somewhere, but I've never been exposed to them). Honestly, if I have developers working with a relational DB doing anything even a little bit complex I want them to not not think twice or even flinch to use or read it (and I say that not really being all that accomplished with the language myself).
Rails has some good niches where it is very well suited. ActiveRecord is OK if you have a very particular data model. However, as they say, if a hammer is your only tool, every problem starts to look like a nail. You may find that if you approach the problem differently, you will find reasons why people choose not to use very simplified ORMs.
As a counterpoint, I love ActiveRecord. It's a Swiss Army knife that's got pretty much everything you need, you just need to find the right tool and use it.
What ActiveRecord isn't is discoverable. Which is to an extent understandable. Its domain is literally anything you could express in SQL. But you really can do anything you want with it, you just have to find the right abstraction. A tool I use a lot is to .to_sql which will show you the compiled SQL fragment in a debugging session. You can compose with bare SQL fragments and ActiveRecord even includes an intermediate library so that you can work at the relational algebra level if you want.
It's not that ActiveRecord forces you to work a certain way. It just doesn't advertise all its features.
Ryan Bigg wrote a great book about breaking away from AR in Rails called Exploding Rails[3]. It's a good read.
[0] http://sequel.jeremyevans.net/
[1] https://github.com/elixir-ecto/ecto
[2] https://rom-rb.org/5.0/learn/introduction/active-record/