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Why we still build with Ruby in 2026 - DEV Community
Excerpt
## But what about scaling? One of the biggest criticisms of Rails is that it doesn't scale. Especially in an age where companies only take months to grow to dozens of millions in ARR, scaling is important. But scale is an architecture and operations problem, not a framework limit. Even at our scale—processing millions of events and API requests—we're nowhere near the limits (and that's true for Shopify, GitHub, GitLab etc. too). There are a few reasons for this: … ## The Rails imperfections we live with Some things require discipline on Ruby: - Performance & memory: Do the wrong things and you'll pay for it. - Concurrency: CRuby's Global VM Lock means only one thread runs Ruby code at a time. This is where we sometimes offload to Go/Rust. - Magic: Rails can be too fancy. That's why we favor explicit, boring code and avoid gem dependencies.
Related Pain Points
Global Interpreter Lock limits Ruby concurrency
7MRI Ruby's Global Interpreter Lock (GIL) prevents true parallelism. While Fibers and async libraries provide some help, Ruby cannot match the seamless concurrency capabilities of Go's goroutines or Elixir's lightweight processes.
Rails 'magic' introduces implicit behavior and hidden dependencies
5Rails can be overly implicit with too much 'magic,' making code less explicit and harder to understand. Developers must exercise discipline to avoid implicit behaviors and gem dependencies that complicate maintenance.