Our Experience Porting the YJIT Ruby Compiler to Rust
I honestly love Ruby and Ruby on Rails, but I can't understand why companies like Shopify and Github go through so much effort to scale Ruby especially at their size. Maybe I am wrong, but couldn't this effort be put to rewriting parts of it in a more performant language like Go or Rust? One has to imagine that they have a large code base, how much developer time is spent writing Tests for Ruby? How much time was spent debugging odd monkey patching gems over the life of the codebase?I do get that developer time was/is more expensive than servers. But I am not so sure at some level of scale. When you need 100 servers vs 5, and need to spend so much testing effort dealing with dynamic language, etc. And then you build custom compilers, special tools for tracing, entire architectures to deal with single threaded model, etc. Between Github & Shopify alone, they could have probably build a very Ruby on Rails like framework on a language more suited to the size and scale of these platforms.