Depending on hundreds of gems means you are depending on the decisions of hundreds of developers with packages which are in constant churn.
Apps like Gitlab and Discourse that depend on hundreds of gems and require end users to have complex build environment and compile software are I think operating a broken user hostile model.
The potential for compilation failures, version mismatches and Ruby oddities like RVM is so gigantic with hundreds of man hours wasted one is left to conclude they may actually want to run a hosting business and not have users deploy themselves.
Compare that to Go or even PHP where things are so orders of magnitude simper that it is not even the same thing. To deal with this complexity you now have containers but have you solved the complexity or added another layer of complexity? There are technical but I think also social factors at play here.
I don't think it's that. GitLab IS a complex setup and Rails is not helping making it simple. There is a ton going on in the stack and the company only has limited resources.
Apps like Gitlab and Discourse that depend on hundreds of gems and require end users to have complex build environment and compile software are I think operating a broken user hostile model.
The potential for compilation failures, version mismatches and Ruby oddities like RVM is so gigantic with hundreds of man hours wasted one is left to conclude they may actually want to run a hosting business and not have users deploy themselves.
Compare that to Go or even PHP where things are so orders of magnitude simper that it is not even the same thing. To deal with this complexity you now have containers but have you solved the complexity or added another layer of complexity? There are technical but I think also social factors at play here.