> Maybe I am wrong, but couldn't this effort be put to rewriting parts of it in a more performant language like Go or Rust?
This is absolutely a valid point, and I'm slightly perplexed as well.
Pragmatic (and smaller) companies like GitLab have indeed approached the system by rewriting part of their product in more performant languages (Golang in GitLab's case).
Another pragmatic approach is Stripe's AOT compiler, which is (I suppose) much less resource-intensive to develop, and it's, in a way, the "optimize-the-bottleneck" approach, rather than trying to improve the performance of the whole language.
> they could have probably build a very Ruby on Rails like framework
This would cost a lot in terms of community and support, it would take a very long time to release, and it would also cost them a lot to migrate to.
All in all, it's perfectly possible that Rails itself is hard to optimize for, and that for large-scale monoliths, splitting out microservices (with moderation!) may be not be effective and/or efficient. But I'm still curious at why GitLab's (moderate!) microservice approach wasn't chosen for Shopify.
This is absolutely a valid point, and I'm slightly perplexed as well.
Pragmatic (and smaller) companies like GitLab have indeed approached the system by rewriting part of their product in more performant languages (Golang in GitLab's case).
Another pragmatic approach is Stripe's AOT compiler, which is (I suppose) much less resource-intensive to develop, and it's, in a way, the "optimize-the-bottleneck" approach, rather than trying to improve the performance of the whole language.
> they could have probably build a very Ruby on Rails like framework
This would cost a lot in terms of community and support, it would take a very long time to release, and it would also cost them a lot to migrate to.
All in all, it's perfectly possible that Rails itself is hard to optimize for, and that for large-scale monoliths, splitting out microservices (with moderation!) may be not be effective and/or efficient. But I'm still curious at why GitLab's (moderate!) microservice approach wasn't chosen for Shopify.