Never Look Back - Why I Haven't Looked Back

Chapter 7: Why I Haven’t Looked Back

This is not an indictment of Ruby on Rails. Rails is a brilliant framework. For a simple CRUD application, a marketing site, or a prototype, its speed and ease of use are nearly unmatched. The gem ecosystem is vast, and the community is enormous and mature.

But for the applications I build today—interactive, long-running, real-time systems that need to be both scalable and maintainable—the trade-offs that Rails makes are no longer the right ones for me.

1. The initial “magic” of Rails became a long-term liability, hiding complexity and making refactoring difficult. Phoenix’s explicitness, while more verbose, provides a clarity that pays dividends over the life of a project.
2. The performance and concurrency limitations of the Ruby MRI required a complex and expensive architecture of multiple processes and machines. The BEAM gives me true parallelism and massive concurrency on a single server, for free.
3. The traditional backend/frontend split, with all its inherent complexity, is elegantly solved by Phoenix LiveView, dramatically increasing productivity and simplifying the entire development process.
4. The “let it crash” philosophy and supervision trees of Elixir/BEAM provide a level of fault tolerance and resilience that makes applications fundamentally more robust.

Read prev: Performance, Scalability, and Peace of Mind | Read next: Conclusion