Ruby vs Golang: Which Is the Best Solution?

The fast growth of software applications is not a question of popularity alone, but a real opportunity to profoundly improve the business process of any industry. Get ahead right away by choosing the perfect programming stack that you will use while creating an excellent software solution. Below, we compare Golang vs Ruby, two of the most notable programming languages of recent years.

Ruby vs Golang: Performance

The key principles of Golang development are simplicity and productivity. Go is very fast to learn, easily readable by developers, and has a simple, intuitive syntax. Rob Pike, one of the leading authors of Go, assures that the language was specially created to simplify the development process and to achieve results faster.

Ruby was also designed with a focus on simplicity and productivity. Moreover, its fans call it a beautiful, artful language. Both Ruby and Golang were influenced by the C-family of programming languages, are relatively young, and, yet, have taken over the hearts and minds of not only programmers but also the people who make business decisions.

Golang programming is ideal for solving both simple and complex, multi-threaded tasks, which isn’t strange at all. Google designed this language to cover its particular coding needs, which tend to be huge. Meanwhile, Ruby is ideal for creating tiny commercial projects, blogs, and personal pages thanks to the popular Ruby on Rails framework. However, for complex solutions, Ruby is not very appropriate. Its performance speed is somewhat low, which might affect the general satisfaction of demanding customers. The performance data, as shown in this benchmark, leads us to the fact that, given equivalent environments, Golang projects run faster than similar projects written in Ruby.

Ruby vs Golang: Community

According to the reputable Tiobe index and Stack Overflow survey, Golang is one of the fastest-growing, loved, and requested programming languages of recent years, while Ruby has become less popular in the last couple of years.

Ruby was created by one person. Go was designed by Google with its extensive cloud infrastructures, supportive community, forums, tutorials, and, most importantly, additional libraries that help the language move forward. Furthermore, Go is preferred by a number of significant companies like Docker, BBC, SoundCloud, Facebook, Dropbox, and even Medium. This is also a guarantee of Go’s further growth in the IT world. In contrast, Ruby was chosen by such great companies as Twitter, Shopify, Crunchbase, etc.

Ruby vs Golang: Compatibility

Integrating programming languages with other parts of the software stack can directly affect how fast new solutions, features, or improvements can be added to the existing program.

Thanks to the natural compatibility of Go with other languages (especially with the C-family languages), many programmers use Golang even in a bundle with different stacks like Python and Go or PHP and Go to improve general app performance. Also, Go interacts with almost all databases as a server-side language. As for Ruby, its compatibility is limited only to the most popular databases.

Ruby vs Golang: Development Experience

Our team has been developing in both languages for many years. Each of them has its pros and cons.

Based on our experience, Golang is perfect both for backend systems of any size and highly-scalable network servers. Go is a modern and competitive language. It provides you with fast and high-quality performance, clean environments, and good compatibility with other technologies. Ruby is useful if you need rapid result delivery, and if the quality of performance is not that important. The choice depends on your final goals.

We hope that our mini guide has been useful to you, and you enjoyed this overview!