Jobs for devs are everywhere that's not what makes a city "startup hub imho.
The only "real" startup hubs are the ones where venture capital is available and these would traditionally be the cities in North America, China, Singapore etc.
Singapore is no way a startup hub. The only major thing going for singapore is its EDB influenced tax sops and seed funding matching programs like 1:4 or 2:5. In addition they have made it hard to hire foreign talents, local talent pool is super small, payscales are very low and worst of all their VC and angel have hardly any tech exposures. The PE scene is better
Same in Korea and Singapore and I doubt it's any different in China. You work for the sake of working not because you have something that urgently needs to be taken care of.
It's ineffective. Lots of asian nations that work overtime are doing it pointlessly because they are already exhausted and do not really contribute that much.
We are getting there, lots of things work right out of the box just fine. C extensions are still being actively worked on as they often need some amount of patching because of assumptions they make about types and so forth. I think we can reduce that, but I doubt it can will disappear entirely, but in the end I hope extension authors will test on TruffleRuby themselves and patch the code themselves.
I know that you are using Rails as a reference point so is there any ETA when will be most of the features usable ? (openssl,activerecord,nokogiri..etc) ?
OpenSSL and nokogiri already work pretty well. ActiveRecord works providing you have a database driver and I’ve got a rough set of patches for pg that I’m working on right now.
I’m working on Discourse at the moment and can run the dB create and migrate tasks and I’m working on the asset compilation pipeline, but it’s all pretty rough and won’t be our final solution.
That sounds promising. I think it's important to keep community in loop and make sure people are aware of limitations and what's already possible and supported.
Not at the moment. I'm mostly doing some ugly hacks to get stuff working and generating a list of bugs for things we need to fix properly. Looking at my branch I think there's one small change that we will want to do PR for in the end, and some dependencies that we may want to make platform dependent (though they recently did change a couple for JRuby, which also helps us). Pretty much everything else I hope to back out when we've fixed a few of the root causes.
It depends on their C API. Ruby doesn't really have one, it just has the exposed internals of the vm, and assumptions that can be made about those which are normally true. That includes type assumptions like VALUE being an integer that you can switch on, and _some_ values such as Qfalse and Qnil being constants that can be used in such switch statements, but it also includes things like being able to have a custom GC mark function for a C data structure.
It's very hard to produce another Ruby implementation without breaking some of those assumptions, but we can hopefully get it down to a small set so the changes needed are minimal.
There are other things like throwing Ruby exceptions across C library boundaries which may work in MRI, but whose behaviour may not be intentional and could already have subtle problems, and I don't think we should be aiming for compatibility in those areas at all. Finding and fixing things like that is normally a good thing to do anyway.
Europe is a big place and covers at least 6 different kinds of lifestyle and 3 kinds of weather. That's a few shades of grass to try before you give up entirely?
We're on HN. The startup industry in most of Europe is non-existent. Very few options. As a founder, much of Europe looks pretty much the same. Want to actually assimilate - good luck given the prevalent ethnocentrism. It's nothing like moving from one US state to another.
To be fair, 75% of US venture capital accumulates in just three states[1], and leaves the overwhelming majority of the country out. The US startup industry is higher but not wider than the European one.
The ethnocentrism is prevalent in US startup culture as well, it is overwhelmingly white and Asian with Hispanics and African-Americans being left out. Underprivileged minorities face steep challenges in the tech industry, almost regardless of geographical location.
1. VC funding is hardly well-spread in Europe - UK, Germany and France compromise roughly 75% of European funding too [0].
2. The entire European pie is roughly 25% of the US.
3. That's racism and it's a problem in the EU too, albeit less recognized. The ethnocentrism is an additional, different one (and it only amplifies racism). It's the way European national identities are defined mostly along ethnic and linguistic lines. American culture and identity is 100x more universalist than the European ones. This means not only will people have a harder time seeing you as one of them, you'll also have a harder time seeing yourself as one.
I didn't really disagree with the first two, but concerning the third one, that's really not true in all places in Europe any more and a little bit of a stereotype. Berlin is very much a cosmopolitan city at this point, and Sweden has always been very open as well. As is London and even cities like Warsaw are becoming more and more accepting.
France and Italy as two very large countries stand out, the former because it's very closed up culturally, the second because it's not in a good shape politically.
I won't deny that the US has a more open culture (having experienced both myself as a German citizen who has worked in the US) but the gap is not so large any more that the generalisation is valid without qualifications.
Ok, so we agree Europe is so much worse for a startup person.
Sure, there are many nice cosmopolitan cities in Europe. If you want to get a few year-long stint doing whatever - not a problem.
What happens once you get children? Are you going to send them to a local school and have them grow up speaking a language you hardly know? If you're Jewish aren't you going to worry about your children getting hurt? If you're an Arab aren't you going to worry about your children being othered? If you're not a Christian, can you fully practice your religion? (i.e. some European countries ban kosher slaughter, there are plans to ban circumcision, burqa bans, Poland just made talking about some parts of the Holocaust illegal). How certain are you an EU citizenship will mean a thing in 10, 20 years? How strong are your property rights? For how long has your European country of choice been a safe, welcoming place?
For some people these aren't big problems, that's okay. For those that do worry about these, they aren't being picky or unreasonable. US is simply a better, safer deal.
"Europe" is essentially meaningless as an identification of a place you live. The difference in culture, society and lifestyle between, say, Athens, Bucharest and Inverness is pretty extensive. There are of course some elements of shared culture, but there are also a whole bunch of different lifestyles.
The same applies in the US to some extent, though of course a common language and federal government homogenises the country much more.
Looking through your comment history, you might want to stop making sweeping generalisations about Europe and then refusing to say which countries you mean.
(I could also be less kind and write: don't feed the troll.)
Apple to me is not a software / services company. They failed to make Swift popular and imho it will just artificially keep Swift alive while everyone else will be using RN,Xamarin and similar.
Swift is popular on their platforms, just like .NET used to be popular only on Windows, or even Java used to run better on Solaris back in the day.
OS companies care about their own developers, getting their own languages used outside of their eco-systems, only when it matters to their bottom line.
Gold is valuable because of its chemical properties and as long as there is a demand for high tech electronics and jewellery it will continue to be so.
The only "real" startup hubs are the ones where venture capital is available and these would traditionally be the cities in North America, China, Singapore etc.