Why did twitter dumped Ruby on Rails ?
For folks who are not aware and often ask Which programming language is twitter written in , the answer is, Scala. Developer at twitter had started with Rub on Rails but looks like they the high volume of traffic was too much for twitter or Ruby on rails ?
Their programmers have been saying
One of the things that I’ve found throughout my career is the need to have long-lived processes. And Ruby, like many scripting languages, has trouble being an environment for long lived processes. But the JVM is very good at that, because it’s been optimized for that over the last ten years. So Scala provides a basis for writing long-lived servers, and that’s primarily what we use it for at Twitter right now.
There could be other reasons which we are not ware of but there have been some real word applications build upon Ruby on rails, noticeably cookfood.com which went public last year. So it is not that Ruby on Rails sucks.
If it comes to poor garbage collection in Ruby on rails , then there is an option to use JRuby . One of the very well written comments on this topic can be found here .
Just because twitter uses Scala and has dumped Ruby on rails does not imply anything. The architect team has to decide what works for them. What may work for twitter does not mean it will work for everyone else.
Ruby on Rails is so…2005. It’s a dying, marginalized platform that was overhyped and thankfully is declining rapidly. Just look at google trends, tiobe, and the latest job trends.
Sorry for the typo mistake. Fixed it.
uses Scala and has dumped Scala ?
@Mark Is’nt this an old post you are pointing to ? I think the latest news is that they have been using Scala to develop messaging queue.
@mark Thanks for clarification . A lot of people have been quoting Scala as language of future with reference to twitter. The link which has been posted in this blog points to one of twitter’s developers statement as to why did they chose Scala.
I think the messaging queue is in Scala and rest of code is on ROR
This is outright false. Not only does Twitter still develop in Rails, but they also use other languages. Scala made a brief appearance, but no longer has any significant presence. The vast majority of their code is Ruby. You can see this in a visualization on Twitter’s own Engineering Blog: http://engineering.twitter.com/2010/02/hello-world.html