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Pros and Cons of Ruby Development | Pangea.ai
Excerpt
## Cons of Ruby Development ### Fast Development, But Slow Performance Ruby is undoubtedly one of the fastest development languages, but in terms of web application performance, it does not always show the best results. Programming languages like Python and NodeJS are still faster. In most cases, the performance of Ruby is weighed down by the database connections and is dependent on the expertise of the developer and how efficiently their code is written. These issues can create a bottleneck for Ruby, resulting in latency. Twitter struggled with Ruby performance and ended up partially replacing it with code in other languages. Ruby was not completely abandoned, but the system was replaced with Scala solutions. ### Lack of Flexibility Ruby follows standards and paradigms strictly, which creates difficulties in changing the core codebase. This results in flexibility losses because there are many configured set objects that can not be modified by developers. This is one of the biggest disadvantages of Ruby, as it doesn’t allow the developers to make required core changes and necessitates a shift to other tech stacks. ### Improper Documentation Documentation is not always up to date for RubyGems which are heavily involved in application development. While documentation is mostly available for the popular gems, trying lesser-known libraries and gems can mean taking your chances. The developer suffers in this case, as they have to repeatedly check for the required functionality and waste development time.
Related Pain Points
Ruby performance limitations compared to alternatives
8Ruby's runtime performance significantly lags behind Go, Rust, Node.js, and Swift, making it unsuitable for production systems where performance is critical. Despite language improvements via YJIT and MJIT, raw speed remains a critical limitation at scale.
Limited flexibility to modify core codebase without major refactoring
6Ruby follows paradigms and standards strictly, making it difficult to change the core codebase. Many configured objects cannot be modified by developers, preventing required core changes without shifting to other tech stacks entirely.
RubyGems documentation is outdated and incomplete
5Documentation for RubyGems is not consistently up to date, particularly for lesser-known libraries. Developers waste significant development time checking for required functionality and repeating verification work when working with undocumented gems.