5 Reasons users are migrating from ROR to Golang

We as a  company specialize in Golang; however, that’s not why we thought of penning this blog down. In recent times a lot of our clients have been requesting to migrate their existing enterprise systems from Ruby on Rails to Golang. Since this was becoming a fairly regular request, we thought of putting together the main reasons for these requests. So here we have the 5 main reasons Businesses want to switch from Rails to Golang. Lets talk about ruby vs golang:

Ruby vs Golang

1. Slow Performance

Almost all the Clients complained of slow performance; which was leading to concurrency bottlenecks. This hits performance and time taken to complete a job is not satisfactory. In contrast, Golang was able to handle a huge load of concurrent requests without slowing down the performance of a program. This is why enterprises with web-based applications, found that Golang based programs were able to handle several users at one time without ever mal performing.

2. Scalability

Scalability is almost always a result of concurrency. An application which can handle concurrent requests will more likely be scalable. We realized when Rails gets to a significant enough scale the runtime speed diminishes significantly resulting in poor performance. Golang, on the other hand, outshines this test by scaling automatically to multiple cores. This ensures that organizations don’t have to worry about migrating costs once the business scales up.

3. High Infrastructure Costs

Rails like most languages of the past consume more compute resources than necessary resulting in high infrastructure cost. This happens because some of the IO libraries do not support multithreading as they keep hold of the GIL (Global Interpreter Lock). As a result, requests get queued up behind the active request and lead to performance issues. The only way to work around this is switching to a multiprocess setup which then leads to higher infrastructure costs. Golang comes as a breather of relief for clients who migrate to Go. It uses isolated goroutines, which helps save on resources such as CPU and memory. This type of resource efficiency not only helps in faster performance but also brings about lower infrastructural costs.

4. Cost of patching errors

Active Record is a hard dependency for many of the RubyGems. The drawback to this is that the domain becomes tightly coupled to persistence mechanism. This leads to some bad architecture decisions. On the other hand, Golang comes with a built-in error type and any deviation from the standard go practices on part of the developer causes an automatic prompt. It leads to fewer chances of error and saves on costs of patching these errors.

5. Huge Go-To-Market time

This happens because for Ruby on Rails Server Configuration and Management is time-consuming. That’s a lot to be done, even before a Rails app is deployed on a production server. The deployment process doesn’t stop once the app is up-and-running. We need to support pushing updates to all servers. This requires the system to support rolling upgrades or stack-swapping to migrate to new versions of the app while continuing to support incoming requests in real-time for the previous version. So basically it gets to be a tedious process. Golang based applications, on the other hand, have no dependencies outside the standard library and require no additional data files at runtime; making them simple to deploy and maintain.

Thus to sum it all up  Golang is like the new dependable car in town; ready for a drive. In spite of being new, it is giving leading developing languages a run for their money. Once you invest in Golang for all your enterprise development needs, chances are that you are not migrating to another language for years to come.

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