Karl Brodowsky's IT-Blog

There are many interesting languages that have their sweet spots and of course a larger set of languages than just two should be considered for new projects.

But Ruby and Scala are both very interesting languages that did not just pick up and sell concepts that were already known, but brought them to a new level and to new beauty. Interestingly, both were started by a single person and finally became community projects.

There are some differences to observe.

Ruby is mostly a dynamic language, which means that it is easier and more natural to change the program at runtime. This is not necessarily a bad thing and different Lisp variants including today’s Clojure have successfully used and perfected this kind of capability for many decades. Consequently more things happen at runtime, especially dynamic typing is used, which means that types only exist at runtime.

Scala is mostly a static language, which means that all program structures have to be created at compile time. But this has been brought to perfection in the sense that a lot of things that are typically available only in dynamic languages, can be done. The type system is static and it is in this sense more consistent and more rigorous than the type system of Java, where we sometimes encounter areas that cannot reasonably be covered by Generics and fall back to the old flavor of untyped collections. This does not happen too often, but the static typing of Scala goes further.

In general this gives more flexibility to Ruby and makes it somewhat harder to tame the ways to do similar things in a static way in Scala. But the type system at compile time of course helps to match things, to find a certain portion of errors and even to make the program more self explanatory without relying on comments. In IDEs it is hard to properly support Scala, but the most common IDEs have achieved this to a very useful level. This should not be overvalued, because there are enough errors that cannot be detected by just using common types. It is possible to always define more specific types which include tight constraints and thus perform really tight checking of certain errors at compile time, but the built in types and the types from common libraries are to convenient and the time effort for this is too high, so it does not seem to be the usual practice. In any case it is a recommended practice to achieve a good test coverage of non-trivial functionality with automated tests. They implicitly cover type errors that are detected by the compiler in Scala, but of course only to the level of the test coverage. Ruby is less overhead to compile and run. We just write the program and run it, while we need a somewhat time intensive compile step for Scala. If tests are included, it does not make so much of a difference, because running the tests or preceding them with a compile job is kind of a minor difference.

An interesting feature of Ruby is called „monkey patching“. This means that it is possible to change methods of an existing class or even of a single object. This can be extremely powerful, but it should be used with care, because it changes the behavior of the class in the whole program and can break libraries. Usually this is not such a bad thing, because it is not used for changing existing methods, but for adding new methods. So it causes problems only when two conflicting monkey patches occur in different libraries. But for big programs with many libraries there is some risk in this area. Scala tries to achieve the same by using „implicit conversions“. So a conversion rule is implicitly around and when a method is called on an object that does not exist in its type, the adequate conversion is applied prior to the method. This works at compile time. Most of the time it is effectively quite similar to monkey patching, but it is a bit harder to tame, because writing and providing implicit conversions is more work and harder to understand than writing monkey patches. On the other hand, Scala avoids the risks of Ruby’s monkey patching.

An increasingly important issue is making use of multiple CPU cores. Scala and especially Scala in combination with Akka is very strong on this. It supports a reasonably powerful and tamable programming model for using multiple threads. The C- or JavaSE-way is very powerful, but it is quite difficult to avoid shooting oneself into the foot and even worse there is a high likelihood that such errors show up in production, in times of heavy load, while all testing seemed to go well. This is the way to go in some cases, but it requires a lot of care and a lot of thinking and a team of skillful developers. There are more developers who think they belong to this group than are actually able to do this well. Of course Scala already filters out some less skilled developers, but still I think its aproach with Akka is more sound.
Ruby on the other hand has very little support for multithreading, and cannot as easily make use of multiple cores by using threads. While the language itself does support the creation of threads, for many years the major implementation had very little support for this in the sense that not actually multiple threads were running at the same time. This propagated into the libraries, so this will probably never become the strength of Ruby. The way to go is to actually start multiple processes. This is not so bad, because the overhead of processes in Ruby is much less than in JVM-languages. Still this is an important area and Scala wins this point.

Concerning web GUIs Ruby has Rails, which is really a powerful and well established way to do this. Scala does provide Play, which is in a way a lot of concepts from Rails and similar frameworks transferred to Scala. It is ok to use it, but rails is much more mature and more mainstream. So I would give this point to Ruby. Rails includes Active Record, about which I do have doubts, but this is really not a necessary component of a pure WebGUI, but more a backend functionality…

So in the end I would recommend to use Scala and Akka for the solution, if it is anticipated that a high throughput will be needed. For smaller solutions I would favor Ruby, because it is a bit faster and easier to get it done.

For larger applications a multi tier architecture could be a reasonable choice, which opens up to combinations. The backend can be done with Scala. If server side rendering is chosen, Ruby and Rails with REST-calls to the backend can be used. Or a single page application which is done in JavaScript or some language compiling to JavaScript and again REST-calls to the backend.