alt Hacker NewsI love the batteries that RoR or Django gives you, but then I also remember how much time it takes to maintain old projects. Updating a project that was started 5-6 years ago takes a lot of time. Part of that is managing dependencies. For Django, they can easily go above 100. Some of them have to be compiled with specific versions of system libraries. Even Docker does not save you from a lot of problems.
Right now, I would rather use Go with a simple framework, or even without one. With Go, it's so easy just to copy the binary over.
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Sometimes I think the issue here is churn. Security fixes aside, what is it that updated dependencies really give? Can't some of these projects just... stop?
I have not had this experience as badly with Laravel. Their libraries seem much more stable to me. We've gone up 5 major versions of Laravel over the last year and a half and it was pretty simple for each major version.
Different experience with Django. I am only using a handful of deps. dj-database-url, dj-static, gunicorn, psycopg are the only "mandatory" or conserved one IMO as a baseline.
Use UV for dep management. Make sure you have tests.
In the past month I migrated a 20 year old Python project (2.6, using the pylons library) to modern Python in 2 days. Runs 40-80 times faster too.
Does batteries included somehow result in upgrading years old projects being a larger lift? I would think the opposite.
Complete opposite of my experience
I have plenty of RoR in production with millions of users, yearly we upgrade the projects and it's fine, not as catastrophic as it sounds, even easier with Opus now
It used to take at least a day of work. In a post-2025/11 world, it is under an hour. Maybe even 15 minutes if you've landed on a high quality LLM session.
In my experience, the magic makes the easy parts easier and the hard parts harder
I'm working on a large (at least 300k+ loc) Django code base right now and we have 32 direct dependencies. Mostly stuff like lxml, pillow and pandas. It's very easy to use all the nice Django libs out there but you don't have to.