“Why We Replaced Rails with Go,” Explains George Clooney

“Ruby on Rails is so slow we needed forty servers just to serve the simplest of applications,” says George Clooney.

Clooney writes this in a letter, and adds real quick:

“I’m married to a barrister and I am a big fan of nice back-ends, but the similarities stops there!”

“I’m not THAT Clooney!”

Hey, Cheeky Coder.

Isn’t it ironic that the creator of Ruby on Rails, David Heinemeier Hansson, is a race track driver!?

He talks big about writing information systems, about them not being science because it’s more like writing French poetry …

If he by that means that the Rails code is impossible to get up to speed, then he’s got a point. We have a fairly simple web application. It has a moderate user base and was backed by 40 – yes, forty – Heroku servers! The performance were all over the place, the JSON serializers were leaking like a sieve and the rats were leaving the ship. Maybe we could have done something to improve the performance, but we didn’t dare. The dynamic typing meant that every deployment to production was a daredevil act! We had to have this insane test-coverage to get any sleep. Compile time errors would be nice!

And nothing in the Daredevil’s manual promised any drastic improvements.

So we shifted to Go. The Golang is smooth sailing. The 40 servers are now two. Yes – two! And the second server is just a back-up server. And the latency is – like – non-existent.

The Heroku-accountants cries! Everyone else is laughing out loud!

But don’t just take my word for it. I’m certainly the last person to give advice on, well, anything.

Best regards,

George Timothy Clooney