Aug/080
Twitter Developer Interview
There’s a short interview with Alex Payne, one of the Twitter developers over at radicalbehavior.com. He’s a Ruby / RoR developer (and big fan), but points out how it falls short for high traffic applications.
A few interesting quotes:
All the convenience methods and syntactical sugar that makes Rails such a pleasure for coders ends up being absolutely punishing, performance-wise.
It’s also worth mentioning that there shouldn’t be doubt in anybody’s mind at this point that Ruby itself is slow.
All of us working on Twitter are big Ruby fans, but I think it’s worth being frank that this isn’t one of those relativistic language issues. Ruby is slow.
Ruby is a great language, but this is just further proof that you need to take a close look at your requirements up front, then pick the best (not necessarily the coolest) tool for the job at hand.