How to build a search engine with Ruby on Rails

This page summarizes the projects mentioned and recommended in the original post on news.ycombinator.com

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  • decidim

    The participatory democracy framework. A generator and multiple gems made with Ruby on Rails

  • perl5

    🐪 The Perl programming language

    Even Perl is still alive https://github.com/Perl/perl5, even in a healthier state than I would have thought.

  • WorkOS

    The modern identity platform for B2B SaaS. The APIs are flexible and easy-to-use, supporting authentication, user identity, and complex enterprise features like SSO and SCIM provisioning.

  • Gogs

    Gogs is a painless self-hosted Git service

    > Rails doesn't scale? Github's the largest code repository site in the world.

    You know, i think i understand both of the viewpoints here. Personally, i'd say that Rails doesn't scale as well as i'd expect it to. You can definitely build scalable systems in it, though you'll end up throwing a whole bunch of hardware resources, when compared to certain other languages and technology stacks, to serve similar load.

    For example, right now i self-host a GitLab (https://about.gitlab.com/) instance for managing my code repositories, CI builds and so on. Even with just me using it (alongside some automated processes), it routinely eats up close to 4 GB of RAM, which in my case is an entire VPSes worth and costs me about 60 Euros a year with Time4VPS (affiliate link, if you'd like to check it out: https://www.time4vps.com/?affid=5294) but would cost me way more in AWS, GCP etc. One could argue that that's not too expensive, but not everyone earns a lot of money and running 10-20 VPSes does eventually build up, since i can't afford colocation and my residential homelab setup with a WireGuard tunnel to bypass ISP NAT with a proxy VPS is pretty slow, even if i can afford more storage, RAM and CPU power that way.

    Compare that situation to projects like Gogs (https://gogs.io/), Gitea (https://gitea.com/), GitBucket (https://gitbucket.github.io/) and sourcehut (https://sourcehut.org/) - i'd argue that all of them on average use less CPU resources and memory for accomplishing similar tasks. For example, have a look here: https://forgeperf.org/

    However, we cannot ignore the fact that using Ruby might have been exactly what allowed for quickly creating the functionality of GitLab and many other platforms and tools out there, GitHub included, so the choice between usable software and innovation in the near future and performant software possibly years from now is a tricky one.

    There are probably good arguments for both, but noone can declare either to be better. Personally, i don't mind using Ruby, Python or even PHP when it makes sense and i don't need to worry about scalability from day 0.

  • Gitbucket

    A Git platform powered by Scala with easy installation, high extensibility & GitHub API compatibility

    > Rails doesn't scale? Github's the largest code repository site in the world.

    You know, i think i understand both of the viewpoints here. Personally, i'd say that Rails doesn't scale as well as i'd expect it to. You can definitely build scalable systems in it, though you'll end up throwing a whole bunch of hardware resources, when compared to certain other languages and technology stacks, to serve similar load.

    For example, right now i self-host a GitLab (https://about.gitlab.com/) instance for managing my code repositories, CI builds and so on. Even with just me using it (alongside some automated processes), it routinely eats up close to 4 GB of RAM, which in my case is an entire VPSes worth and costs me about 60 Euros a year with Time4VPS (affiliate link, if you'd like to check it out: https://www.time4vps.com/?affid=5294) but would cost me way more in AWS, GCP etc. One could argue that that's not too expensive, but not everyone earns a lot of money and running 10-20 VPSes does eventually build up, since i can't afford colocation and my residential homelab setup with a WireGuard tunnel to bypass ISP NAT with a proxy VPS is pretty slow, even if i can afford more storage, RAM and CPU power that way.

    Compare that situation to projects like Gogs (https://gogs.io/), Gitea (https://gitea.com/), GitBucket (https://gitbucket.github.io/) and sourcehut (https://sourcehut.org/) - i'd argue that all of them on average use less CPU resources and memory for accomplishing similar tasks. For example, have a look here: https://forgeperf.org/

    However, we cannot ignore the fact that using Ruby might have been exactly what allowed for quickly creating the functionality of GitLab and many other platforms and tools out there, GitHub included, so the choice between usable software and innovation in the near future and performant software possibly years from now is a tricky one.

    There are probably good arguments for both, but noone can declare either to be better. Personally, i don't mind using Ruby, Python or even PHP when it makes sense and i don't need to worry about scalability from day 0.

NOTE: The number of mentions on this list indicates mentions on common posts plus user suggested alternatives. Hence, a higher number means a more popular project.

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