1044: Ruby on Rails is Dead

Scott Tolinski (0:00)

What's up, everybody? We are here for another Syntax Live. Today, we're talking about Meta Muse. Opus 5.5 came out, and my gosh, it's a good model. Pi is adding MCP and Ruby on Rails. Well, I think it's dead, folks.

We're gonna be talking about all that and more, as always, on the Syntax weekly. We come to you with all of the stuff that's been happening over the last week, and as usual, there is stuff happening. My name is Scott Tolinski. I'm a developer from Denver. With me, as always, is Wes Bos and CJ Reynolds. What's up, guys?

Wes Bos (0:35)

I'm all hopped up on Meta Muscle, ready to talk about the latest and greatest.

Scott Tolinski (0:41)

I had a Meta Muscle joke locked and loaded. I had one ready.

Yes.

Wes Bos (0:48)

What a name. What a name.

Scott Tolinski (0:50)

Yes. What a name. Yes. Yes. Yes.

So guys, how are we all doing? Are we all feeling good? It's a Monday morning. Everybody feeling good?

Wes Bos (1:00)

Oh, yeah. Ready to rock. Let's start talking about tech, man.

Scott Tolinski (1:04)

Let's start talking about tech. Let's get into it. UPM.

CJ, what the heck is UPM?

CJ Reynolds (1:11)

UPM is a fast, tiny package manager for the NPM registry. So this was created by Pooya Parsa.

If you are not familiar with them, they're the creator of UnJS, also of NitroJS. They're a core contributor to Nux. They've done a lot of cool stuff in the open-source space. And they have created UPM.

Scott Tolinski (1:31)

Not to be confused with UPN, the... Do you remember UPN, folks?

CJ Reynolds (1:36)

No.

Scott Tolinski (1:37)

Oh, my God.

CJ Reynolds (1:38)

It was like...

Scott Tolinski (1:39)

Dude, that was a TV network that had all kinds of stuff on it in the 90s. My God. I'm surprised that nobody knows about UPN.

CJ Reynolds (1:48)

Doesn't ring a bell.

Scott Tolinski (1:50)

I think it definitely became the WB network or something.

CJ Reynolds (1:53)

I see. But the cool thing about this is it's not written in Rust. Unlike every other fast developer tool that's come out recently, it's written in TypeScript and it says it installs at native class speed and has a JS API at a fraction of the size of native tools compatible with NPMRC and lock files. If you head to upm.sh, you can try it out. Here are some of the benchmarks that Pooya posted. So in terms of size, it's only 85 kilobytes packed. And you could compare that to PNPM, which is like 5 megabytes, or BUN, which is like 35 megabytes. So it's really tiny. And what they're saying is some of the biggest wins here are in smaller, lower resource CI environments.

So for a cold install, it also is really fast. It's coming in at about one second total, comparing it across other projects. So the same project within PNPM would take 26 seconds to install.

With Dino would take 10 With Bun would take 1.76. PNPM, 1.43. And UPM is the fastest one.

Wes Bos (2:57)

How is that even possible, though? Like, how is there, like, I understand, like, oh, yeah, NPM, whatever. But like, in some of these cases, like, how is it possibly 10 times faster?

CJ Reynolds (3:09)

Yeah, I don't know all of the details. But one thing I do know and one of the points that they make about CI is that they say Node.js boots a few milliseconds slower than a native binary. So it's going to be slower to start up than something like PNPM, which the latest is written in Rust. But when you're running those installs on CI, it actually has to copy the native binary, whether it's PNPM or BUN or whatever else, into the particular run of CI. And that copying of 50 to 150 megabytes from the cache usually takes longer than it takes for this tiny NodeJS script to just start up.

Wes Bos (3:50)

So something that's warm, you're not seeing 10 seconds in an instance that's already warm.

CJ Reynolds (3:57)

Yeah. So at least when we're talking about CI installs, if that native binary is already there and ready to go, it is going to start up a little bit faster. But what they're talking about is like fresh runs. Essentially, it only has to copy over 85 kilobytes instead of an entire native binary. So it's going to start up a lot quicker.

But I think they also do a lot of the things that like PNPM and all of these modern package managers do. Like there's a cache that it installs on your local system. So packages you've installed before are going to install a lot quicker. The other fascinating thing is on their site, they show you and I guess you can specify a package name, and it will show you what it's like to install with UPM in the browser. So this does similar stuff to sites like Bolt.dev, some of the in-browser editors. And so you specify a package name, it will show you how fast it was able to install that inside of your web browser. So Vue was like under a second for the entire library and all of its dependencies.