This was Rails, years before Ruby mattered at all.
Back in 1999 I joined a startup (Intervento) that had a product based on the same ideas, we created our own Tcl module that could be plugged into either Apache or IIS, had a DB abstraction layer that would generate all CRUD stuff for each table for Informix, MSSQL, Sybase SQL, DB2, Access, Oracle, targeting Aix, HP-UX, Solaris, Windows NT/2000, (we also had Linux but it wasn't considered production ready), extensions could be furter coded in either Tcl or C, and we had an IDE written in VB 6.
We got acquired and became part of Altitude Software, eventually as MSFT partners we got early access to .NET and decided to port the same ideas into .NET, this gave us the performance that Tcl/C didn't deliver under very heavy loads, and Visual Studio.NET was better that what we managed to have with our in-house IDE.
Eventually some of Intervento founders left, and created what is nowadays known as OutSytems, one of the few successful low code companies.
It was a great experience, however as one the persons responsible to optimize Tcl code into C modules, and part of the .NET migration team, I learned to never consider languages without a JIT/AOT compiler for nothing serious beyond OS scripting tasks.
I've written a lot of code in my life. It's fun to think about how much of it gave me a lot of grief when I was writing it and it's not even running anymore haha. On the flip side, it's a bit existential to think about code I've written outliving me and running on peoples' machines long after I'm gone...
> It was a great experience, however as one the persons responsible to optimize Tcl code into C modules, and part of the .NET migration team, I learned to never consider languages without a JIT/AOT compiler for nothing serious beyond OS scripting tasks.
As a slight aside, I once worked on a molecular dynamics simulation program which used Tcl for the basic setup, and then performance critical parts were done in C. A fine enough approach, except that the original authors had decided that the one hammer to get good performance out of C was inlining. And they used this everywhere. Literally everywhere. Everything except for main() and some I/O functions was defined in "static inline" functions in header files.
Back in 1999 I joined a startup (Intervento) that had a product based on the same ideas, we created our own Tcl module that could be plugged into either Apache or IIS, had a DB abstraction layer that would generate all CRUD stuff for each table for Informix, MSSQL, Sybase SQL, DB2, Access, Oracle, targeting Aix, HP-UX, Solaris, Windows NT/2000, (we also had Linux but it wasn't considered production ready), extensions could be furter coded in either Tcl or C, and we had an IDE written in VB 6.
We got acquired and became part of Altitude Software, eventually as MSFT partners we got early access to .NET and decided to port the same ideas into .NET, this gave us the performance that Tcl/C didn't deliver under very heavy loads, and Visual Studio.NET was better that what we managed to have with our in-house IDE.
Eventually some of Intervento founders left, and created what is nowadays known as OutSytems, one of the few successful low code companies.
It was a great experience, however as one the persons responsible to optimize Tcl code into C modules, and part of the .NET migration team, I learned to never consider languages without a JIT/AOT compiler for nothing serious beyond OS scripting tasks.