- cross-posted to:
- fediverse@lemmy.ml
- cross-posted to:
- fediverse@lemmy.ml
Seems like an interesting effort. A developer is building an alternative Java-based backend to Lemmy’s Rust-based one, with the goal of building in a handful of different features. The dev is looking at using this compatibility to migrate their instance over to the new platform, while allowing the community to use their apps of choice.
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Competition is good. We need to take the web back
There used to be hookers, and blackjack. In fact just bring back the 80’s
Java backend? What year is it?
I think the people who say this and think Rust is the second coming of Jesus, just don’t code. You choose the right language that’s needed for the job. Server stuff like this is Java’s bread and butter. As amazing as Rust is, it has proven to not be a great choice for Lemmy’s development.
I’m curious why you say Rust “ has proven “ to not be a great choice. There is a lack of Rust programmers, but its been the fastest growing community on GitHub for multiple years now, and has proven to be viable at all level of the stack.
Full disclaimer: I code and work in Rust daily on the backend and frontend.
Full disclaimer: I code and work in Rust daily on the backend and frontend.
Would you and your colleagues be interested in contributing to Lemmy’s codebase? I’m genuinely asking, I’m still surprised by the low number of contributors for a project that has 40k active monthly users
I barely have time to contribute to fix bugs in the dependencies I use. If I had more time for OSS contributions I might, but I’m not in my 20s anymore and when I’m not at work I’m taking care of my family.
My colleagues and friends are free to do as they please.
I guess that’s the same for most of the userbase. Which is probably why switching to a more spread language could increase the number of contributors.
It certainly sounds more likely that you “just don’t code”.
God damn you are fucking annoying
2024, Java is still the 2nd language on GitHub with 11,7% of the total code hosted, while Rust is number 13 with 1,8%
Is Big Coffee paying you to shill Java all over this post?
If only… More seriously, I want Lemmy/Kbin/Sublinks to succeed, and the development rhythm of Lemmy made me perplex for a while.
A new option with a more popular language could address this.
Java has been around for decades longer than Rust, comparing total code numbers doesn’t tell the whole story
That’s not the whole story, most of the Java code that exists is proprietary, java is undoubtedly #1
You actually think there’s more Java code than JavaScript? Basically every website in the world feels the need to use JS nowadays.
obviously I wasn’t counting JS because by sheer volume, HTML+CSS+JS will outnumber everything because it’s the only combo for the browser.
but if you restrict it as JS for Backend, then obviously it’s not even close to Java.
If you can write off JS because “you have to use it because it’s the internet” then I can write off Java because “you have to use it for billions of 20 year old legacy applications”.
I am not writing it off, I am saying it has no competition in the browser… therefore irrelevant to the discussion at hand.
and btw, even in the link https://madnight.github.io/githut/#/pull_requests/2023/4 Javascript is not first, Python is, over Java.
but once again, you would actually have to look for the backed JS applications, you are not choosing java over JS for the web, at best you would choose JSF and that still uses javascript.
Js is not a real language and can’t hurt you
Java is still a strong language.
Based on all the other threads and cross posts it just seems like this software is being created because Jason Grim doesn’t like the lemmy devs or their politics. I guess that’s as good of a reason to fork as any. I’m happy with the way lemmy is and how its being created so I have been doing monthly donations to them for its development.
It’s not a fork though. It’s a complete rewrite in another programming language. That’s way more effort than a petty project.
The truth is, this might succeed based on developer reach. I love Rust, but I know it won’t have the reach (yet) that Java can, and more developers mean faster progress.
In the end, between this, Lemmy or another project which may be a fork of either, the success will be due to efforts of everyone involve at every stage. This wouldn’t exist without Lemmy, and Lemmy wouldn’t exist with ActivityPub.
I’m not sure I believe “faster” progress really means anything when two communists are creating a hobby software that isn’t really for business or necessarily targeting growth at all costs.
This is not hobby software, this is public good software. They are paid in large part by grants
I can’t find the fucking porn on Lemmy, so maybe this is a good thing.
Don’t thank us.
lemm.ee doesn’t block it, so it’s not a problem with your instance. You don’t have to ask how I know
Lemmynsfw
I have a hard time believing that rewriting the backend from scratch would be faster than getting PRs approved on the main project.
Forks like this with one guy who “knows best” usually die a slow quiet death as they get left behind by the main project.
I think quicker feature development makes some sense, because there are more Java developers in the world and not many Java developers care to learn Rust. It’s easier to get contributions in more popular languages.
Rust is also awfully uptight about doing every little aspect right, which can be a bit annoying when iterating on program design, especially if you don’t have a lot of experience writing Rust code.
I’m a Java developer and I would much rather pick up Rust to join an active project than try to rebuild something that already works using a less-marketable language.
Sure, but it’s a lot more work for you to get to a point where you can be an active contributor.
Is it really a lot of work for an experienced dev? I can pick up most new languages in a day or 2 unless it’s a total paradigm shift.
1-2 days is enough to learn the basics, but I doubt you’ll be as nearly as productive as with something you’ve been using for years. Keep in mind that new languages also mean new frameworks, etc, some which take years to actually master, but at least months to get a good handle on them.
Also, from my understanding, Rust is a bit of a paradigm shift.
I think how quickly this project has gotten to near feature parity is a testament to how slow Lemmy development has been. Think about scaled sort (a feature that has been hotly requested since the migration) and how long that took to get merged in. A sort should not by any means be slow to implement.
A sort should not by any means be slow to implement.
Sure, if the sort key is something readily available. But for scaled sort they have to compute relative size/activity of the communities the specific user is in. The cost isn’t the sort, it’s computing the metric.
I’m not talking about the literal sorting algorithm. Pretty sure scaled sort is exactly one more operation than hot.
IMO slow development isn’t necessarily a bad thing.
I like that there was a two month period for apps to adopt the new login mechanism and that they smoke test releases for a fair bit on lemmy.ml before releasing to the world.
That said, a few months ago I wanted to do a light fork of Lemmy to proof out a few very minor things on my mental wishlist but just haven’t had the free time to meddle with Rust.
IMO slow development isn’t necessarily a bad thing.
Quite the opposite, often it’s a benefit as you don’t end up wasting time and changing code for features where you don’t actually know yet whether your current usage demands or supports them. There’s a lot of genefit in not moving fast and not breaking things. Mostly that, well, you don’t constantly break things.
IMO slow development isn’t necessarily a bad thing.
Sure but even just recently there was the example of breaking federation over Christmas. Some of those issues persist through 0.19.3 which came out today
Yeah, that was definitely annoying. I would’ve preferred to have some kind of official workaround but I figured something out that got me through until the updates.
I probably lean too hard into forgiveness on this stuff but I know a number of open source devs who have burned out for various reasons this past year and would much rather see slow development than risking a rush towards burnout.
One nice thing about this project is that it integrated an OpenAPI spec generator, something the Lemmy backend lacks. Using this generator, developers can download a file and automatically generate all the code necessary to read and submit data to the Lemmy API without hand crafting a bunch of requests.
As long as Sublinks is fully compatible with Lemmy, that means you can use this project to make developing Lemmy apps easier!
There’s a library for JS: https://join-lemmy.org/api/index.html
There is, but it’s barely documented and you practically need to reverse engineer it if you want to use the API in another language. There’s a package out there that will parse and convert the Typescript output to Go code but I had to fix a lot of conversion errors last time I used that, I’d much rather stick to the OpenAPI document.
Same. When making pythorhead, I had to dig into the rust code to understand things.
There’s a user made OpenAPI spec: https://github.com/MV-GH/lemmy_openapi_spec - You probably mean that one
I’ve had similar issues as you mentioned that the dev did fix - but yea, Typescript has less precision than Rust (the source) or the openapi spec. And the Typescript client is build for Lemmy-JS and not build an example for other language client libraries…
Though the OpenAPI Documents in C# and Java are based on reflection of the source itself, and Rust doesn’t have Reflection like that… So it’s probably difficult for them to add without manually maintaining the OpenAPI specs
What missing features are so important that you decide to recreate the entire backend of Lemmy because you think the devs aren’t fast enough?
Good mod tools
This looks like the major driver of the project, IMO. The Sublinks roadmap is full of feature ideas geared toward better moderation, both at the community and instance level.
Java instead of Rust is going to be a big thing for a lot of people who would like to contribute in their spare time. Yeah, Rust is cool, but every CS grad and their mother knows Java.
Back during the migration surge a few months ago, you commonly saw a LOT of comments from folks saying they would love to help eat away at the project’s backlog, but they just didn’t have the time or energy to learn Rust at the moment.
Any recent CS grad is obsessed with rust, trust me. It’s not hard to learn either with that background.
I’m not saying that rewriting he backend is a good choice, but for me specifically, I’d like Lemmy to be written in Java. Why? I’m a Java software engineer for nearly 7 years now and I’d like to contribute. Yes, I could learn Rust, like I did learn Go, C, C++ and other languages during my cs studies. But I really don’t have the free time and motivation to do that after I already worked 8-10 hours at my computer. If I could use my existing Java knowledge to quickly fix some small bugs or whatever, I’d love to do that. But the hurdle to learn a new language (including other paradigms and best practices) just to contribute to this one project is just too high for me.
Yeah, Rust is cool, but every CS grad and their mother knows Java.
Sure, twenty-five years ago, when Sun was pushing their language hard into colleges everywhere.
Now? Sun Microsystems doesn’t even exist, and everybody hates the JVM in an ecosystem where VMWare, Docker, and Kubernetes do the whole “virtual machine” model much better.
Now? Sun Microsystems doesn’t even exist
That was a long, long, long time ago.
Java has continued to be very popular after Oracle purchased Sun Microsystems.
Can’t say I agree. It feels like an almost even 50/50 split between Java and C# when I look at job postings.
I think rust is a very pragmatic choice, lemmy is decentralized, the security benefits are a necessity when it comes to self hosters donating hardware
Java is also memory safe
Ah yes, that explains the log4j fiasco
That wasn’t a memory safety issue, that was a what the fuck were you thinking design issue. It would have been batshit in any language
After working in java for over a decade, I will never use another garbage-collected language if I can avoid it again. I still have nightmares about debugging memory build-ups and having to trace down where to do manual garbage collection. I remember my shop eventually just paid for 32 GB ram servers, and java filled those up too.
Rust doesn’t have these problems because its not a garbage collected language like java or go, and has an ownership-based memory model that’s easy to work with.
Is that still a problem in newer java versions? I have to admit I have only written simple things in java.
Garbage collection is by nature imperfect, its impossible for it to always be correct about when and what things to free up in memory. The best option is to not use a garbage collected language.
Yeah, Rust is cool, but every CS grad and their mother knows Java.
This is quite an outdated view I would say.
Lemmy doesn’t have to have missing features for someone to want to write their own implementation. And in a decentralized system you want multiple implementations to exist. This is a good thing
Why Java though ? Like really ? It’s… Better than any other compiled language ?
Because modern Java is an OK language with a great ecosystem to quickly build web backends. And there are lots of java devs which means more potential contributors.
Exactly. It’s also using Spring Boot, Hibernate, and Lombok. It looks just like projects at work. It might be the first fediverse project I contribute regularly to.
Spring Boot, Hibernate, and Lombok
Ah, yes. How about he kitchen sink and another 5000 dependencies to make Java bareable to code in? Actually lets skip Java cos it’s an over-engineered cluster-fuck that considers verbosity a virtue.
If you don’t want to contribute, don’t. Do you think being a hater is helpful?
+1 same
I tried to contribute to Lemmy, spent a few hours really confused by rust and gave up. I can meaningfully contribute to a Java/Spring project, not a rust one.
Hello world in Java = 500 lines of code.
Hello world in Rust = 3 lines of code.
Java is over-engineered corporate bullshit used by banks and Android development. Nobody programs Java for the fun of it.
BS
Java devs are the reason humanity will never have FTL drives.
Hello World is < 10 lines in Java. Just say you don’t know the language and go away.
Java runs the majority of corporate software out there, and it is very good at what it’s built for.
I’ll take Java over Python/Rust any day of the week
Probably because everyone knows it and its more predictable
Predictable in what sense?
If you say the function should only recieve one argument and returns always boolean. It is predictable to only allow the wanted args and forces you to return a boolean.
For example in a less predictable programming language e.g. Python: I can do all above but python does not stop anyone to put more or less arguments to a function, or a developer not adding typehints or not complying to them and return a string instead of a boolean.
But i had it wrong rust is similar to java on that part.
But still it is a lot more popular and easier to start with. So there will be a lot more contributor to sublinks than lemmy ever had.
Well in that sense Rust is even more predictable than Java. In Java you can always get back exception that bubbled up the stack. Rust function would in that case return Result that you need to handle somehow before getting the value.
That i dont understand? How can it be a result that i need to handle? If its not correct than java will throw an error. ( As expected, shit in shit out )
It’s a great and probably the best error system I’ve seen, instead of just throwing errors and having bulky try catch statements and such there’s just a result type.
Say you have a function that returns a boolean in which something could error, the function would return a Result<bool, Error> and that’s it. Calling the function you can choose to do anything you want with that possible Error, including ignoring it or logging or anything you could want.
It’s extremely simple.
If I except a boolean, there is an error and get a Result, is Result an object? How do I know if I get a bool or error?
It’s probably got the best library/tooling ecosystem of any language out there. Certainly dwarfs Rust in that regard. Easier to find devs. Reasonably efficient thou not as much as Rust and typically less memory efficient. It’s a perfectly good suggestion for a project like Lemmy. I’d reach for Java or Go before Rust for a project like this but you know, that’s just me.
You see, Go would’ve been a better option than Java.
It would have been a good option. As is Java. If you want to do it in Go, go ahead.
an alternative Java-based backend
kill it with fire
an alternative Java-based backend to Lemmy’s Rust-based one
Going from a modern well-designed language to an old-and-busted, kitschy, memory-hogging, bloated language. This is literally a step backwards.
Rust, Go… hell, even Ruby-on-Rails or whatever Python is offering nowadays would be a better choice.
Modern Java isn’t that bad, and with new developments like the graalvm and cloud native builds, or what they are called, the footprint of a modern Java app can be comparable to an golang app.
Modern Java kinda has the same image problem as modern PHP. Not saying is all great, but it sure has seen quite the improvements in the last years
they are also working to make developers have less boiler plate. java might be an old language but the development has not stopped but only going better these days.
Or C#, it’s literally “Java, but good”.
The only time I would choose Java for a new project is if I had a hard dependency on something that only works with Java…
Seems like here the number of developers comfortable in Java is a dependency
I’m a long time Java developer who was recently moved to a project written in Go. All I can say is: What. The. Fuck. I swear, the people who designed the syntax must have been trying to make every wrong decision possible on purpose as a joke. The only think I can think of is that they only made design decisions on the syntax while high on shrooms or something.
Like, why in the actual fuck does the capitalization of a function change the scope??? Who thought that was a good idea? It’s not intuitive AT ALL. Just have a public/private keyword.
Nah, Java is alright. All the old complicated “enterprise” community and frameworks gave it a bad reputation. It was designed to be an easier, less bloated C++ (in terms of features/programming paradigms). It’s also executed fairly efficiently. Last time I checked, the same program written in C would typically take 2x the time to complete in Java; whereas it would take 200x the time to complete in Python. Here’s some recent benchmarks: https://benchmarksgame-team.pages.debian.net/benchmarksgame/fastest/python3-java.html
I haven’t had a chance to try Rust yet, but want to. Interestingly, Rust scores poorly on source-code complexity: https://benchmarksgame-team.pages.debian.net/benchmarksgame/how-programs-are-measured.html#source-code
Next step, is to remake Lemmy in JavaScript. Pure JavaScript, no typescript, only express, nothing else
rewrite it in perl with a flat file database.
I like this, I will contribute to this, I think a lot of Java haters in this thread fail to realize just how massive Java is compared to everything else.
Rust might be the latest, hottest, bestest Java killer out there and it might be a completely superior language to Java, doesn’t matter, it’s dwarfed in terms of how many people actually use it for real projects, projects that should run for years and years. Even if Rust is the true Java killer, it’s gonna take a good few more years for it to kill java, measured in decades, there is just way too many projects and critical stuff out there that is running on Java, that means lots of jobs out there for java, still and still more.
This means there are a lot of senior Java programmers out there with lots of years of experience to contribute to this project.
Plus Lemmy itself having alternatives and choices is just a good thing.
Languages won’t grow if you ditch them for other ones. There’s lots of reasons to use rust, outside of the size of the project
I think you will find that the biggest reason to use a language is to get paid for it and there Java is very well positioned
That’s the reason for for hire devs yeah, but if you are starting a new project ( especially a community one like lemmy where the profit motive is different) choosing your tech stack is a complex decision
Thank you for your perspective
I am not a fan of Java. However, I think that you are 100% correct. This is a potentially very useful stack to have available and I hope that the two projects track together well.
This project has potential for high velocity development that Lemmy will never be able to match, purely because of the languages. Rust is, factually, slower to develop in than Java, even for experienced devs. Add to that the greater population that is comfortable with Java, and you have a recipe for really pushing interesting things and innovating quickly. Possibly establishing a relationship somewhat like Debian Sid to Debian Stable. It could also be interesting to have some low-level, Rust modules that are shared between the two when Lemmy gets to 1.0 (API stability), if there is something that is more optimally implemented in Rust but that would introduce more coupling.
Forget the backend! I just want the frontend not to crap itself whenever it can’t fetch the site icon!
No kidding. I’m an Ops guy and I’ve hosted hundreds of web applications professionally and for fun over the years but Lemmy has been one of the more frustrating and brittle experiences I’ve had.
I’ve figured out a few of the quirks by now but I definitely spent a whole afternoon troubleshooting why the front end wouldn’t load at all only to discover the real issue was with Pict-rs.
Have you tried any of the web client alternatives (“Web” filter): https://lemmyapps.netlify.app/ ?
Yeah, I run Photon on base domain because I couldn’t count on lemmy-ui.
The Photon developer is assisting with the development of the new front-end :)
That’s good news. Hopefully they’ll get let you change your avatar in that new UI because that’s one of the weirdly missing Photon features.
We have our own engineers working on it with him along with the developer of pangora. It’s a full collaborative effort to make the best we can.
with the developer of pangora
It’s like the Avengers are gathering
A new front-end is coming too. We need a new front-end to support all the new features we’re adding.
Mine had accumulated 420MB of cookie data the other day. Had to clear it before I could log in. I thought the instance was dead.
Having a frontend rewrite seemed more critical than trying reimplementing the backend in a different language.
Remember, Lemmy had 4 years of development to iron out bugs, and this is essentially promising to make something in months that has a fully compatible backend to support all the third party apps, while adding features on top of what Lemmy has, and with a better front end with better mod tools to boot, with a complete rewrite of everything.
The scope of this project has planned for is already unviable. Suppose that Sublinks does reach feature parity to the current version of Lemmy, congratulations, the backend or mod tools is not something a regular user is going to notice or care about at all, all they will know is that suddenly, there are weird bugs that wasn’t there before, and that causes frustration.
And this project is going to get more developer traction because… Java?
I’d like to be proven wrong, but I’m very sceptical about the success of Sublinks, because it look like a project that was started out of tech arrogance to prove a point than out of a real need, I don’t work in tech, but the general trajectory of these kind of projects is that “enthusiasm from frustration” can only take you so far before the annoyance of dealing with mundane problems piles up, and the project fizzles out and ends with a whimper.
Lemmy had 4 years of development to iron out bugs
Lemmy had 4 years to accrue technical debt and make foot-guns first-class features. A rewrite is probably exactly what it needs.
Have you read the source code? I’m not trying to be a smartass, I’m genuinely curious.
I have and if I’m honest I’m probably a little bit too harsh. I think the bigger issue is honestly the priorities of the dev team. There’s good reason that this project is focussing on moderation tooling.
What sort of moderation tools are you missing in Lemmy?
Some things that seem hard to argue with:
- A mod panel with things like ‘add moderator’ (maybe this could be attached to the new moderator view?)
- Targeted reports (choose who receives it; admin/moderator)
- Moderation actions on jerboa
- Moderator edits. There’s a fine line here and I can understand why you wouldn’t want total edit capabilities but it’d be nice to at least be able to do things like mark as nsfw and add content warnings. This sort of feature should also probably target megathreads
- Private communities (I know local only communities are in the works but there’s a whole mess of other criteria that would be useful)
My own personal wishlist:
- Karma requirements
- First class wikis
- Hashtags (I actually think a super simple stopgap solution here is to just have them link to the appropriate search page)
- Flairs
There’s some other stuff that I have seen PRs for and I do understand y’all are working hard. I appreciate the work you’ve done so far and the communities you’ve helped build. The Internet is undoubtedly a better place for it.
Dessalines is currently working on mod actions for Jerbia. Someone recently made a PR for moderator edits but it seems there was not enough interest and it was closed by the author. Better reports handling would be nice, but if you read the issue its not really clear how this should work. Private communities are on the roadmap for this year.
Karma is intentionally left out of Lemmy because it has many negative effects. Wikis make more sense as a standalone project, in fact Im working on something. Flairs are also potentially on the roadmap. For hashtags I dont really see the benefit as they would serve a very similar purpose to communities.
The ones on the Sublinks roadmap are interesting, for instance the warning system: https://github.com/orgs/sublinks/projects/1/views/7
Create a way to create a warning system for users. For example, a user gets a warning for posting a broken link multiple times. We don’t want to ban them for that. Or a admin gives a user a Warning with a reason. Create a rules system for auto actions like banning for some time or forever. Consider adding types of warnings. This should also track bans from communities for admin-level auto actions. The profile page shows strikes similar to Mastodon for Mods/Admins only and the user that owns the profile. Examples, warnings in each community, and bans. Rules will be applied to counts of warning types or total warnings over time. 3 warnings within a month is a ban for a month, for example.
There was also this list from a few months ago: https://discuss.online/post/12787?scrollToComments=true
True a warning system makes sense.
And you think that a rewrite would magically solve all those technical debts?
Magically no, but sometimes a clean slate is easier than a refactor. I’m speaking generally though, I’ve never looked at Lemmy’s code, and I’m not even who you originally replied to.
I have higher hopes. Java is three times more developers than Rust (https://www.statista.com/statistics/793628/worldwide-developer-survey-most-used-languages/), and you can see in this thread a number of people saying they could contribute as they know Java and not Rust.
Let’s hope for the best.
Just peeking at the source code and it all looks like pretty standard stuff. Looks just like apps I’ve worked on at several jobs.
Is it sexy? No. But a lot of people have experience with this and could help develop.
Only time will tell if this project pays off though
Java is a corporate language that most devs hate. Rust (Lemmy) is more popular as a hobby language that devs enjoy hacking in for fun.
As a java dev, I can say that we hate working with java and love working with java at the same time.
Ah, an anime consumer. Explain to me why FMA:B is the greatest anime ever made?
fmab is another regular anime that’s overshilled.
Java is a corporate language that most devs hate
Citation required, because strangely enough people whom I hear about complaining about Java never seem to be the good developers but the ones I wouldn’t hire
Hm, Java is hated by devs, but still 2nd language on GitHub with 11,7% of the total code hosted, while Rust is number 13 with 1,8%?
Stockholm syndrome.
And even more, the Lemmy codebase doesn’t really have any important developers besides the two main devs: https://github.com/LemmyNet/lemmy/graphs/contributors.
Even looking at the contributions to something like Mbin, which has been around for much shorter, you already see 6 people with more than 50 commits, while Lemmy has one
We have 13 contributors with Sublinks so far. I expect more will come after the announcement.
Java devs like you need to step away from the PC and stop assaulting the world with a terrible language. You should be ashamed of yourselves for inflicting decades of misery on the world.
Java will go the way of COBOL. The future is Nim.
How much of that 11.7% is 35-character class names?
I’m only half joking.
It’s by amount of pull requests, so the length of class names and other Java boilerplate doesn’t count.
That’s bullshit, frankly
I’m pretty sure Nutomic was a Java dev before starting work on Lemmy and learning Rust from scratch. That by itself should already speak volumes.
One-Up projects like this rarely ever turn out well, that’s from my own experiences. Even though this isn’t a popular view, I still think I’m right on this one, we can circle back in say, 6 months, to see if my predictions are right.
it it common to announce a ‘major rewrite’ without having it complete?
i mean, at the moment, theres little to discern it from lemmy at the moment… why make a big public proclamation about it before you even touch the front end?
To get contributors to the backend?
i guess. i would think there are better avenues looking for devs though
I’m pretty sure Nutomic was a Java dev before starting work on Lemmy and learning Rust from scratch.
That is true, I used to be an Android developer and then learned Rust by writing code for Lemmy. Are you by any chance my new stalker?
And if we’re comparing the languages, the fact alone that there are no Nullpointerexceptions makes Rust infinitely better than Java for me. I also agree that this sort of copycat project will soon be forgotten. For example have you ever heard of Rustodon?
Are you by any chance my new stalker?
No, it was on that AMA you guys did months ago, and I remember things about people.
Very impressive! The only thing I can remember well are places.
there are no Nullpointerexceptions makes Rust infinitely better than Java for me.
what’s wrong with having null pointer exception?
I also was a professional java dev, and also had to use spring boot in most corporate environments.
I don’t wanna knock anyone’s re-write, because I know how difficult it is to dissuade someone when they’re excited about a project. But to me, starting a new project or doing a rewrite, is the best opportunity to learn a newer, better language. We taught ourself Rust by coding lemmy, and I recently learned Kotlin / jetpack compose because I wanted to learn android development. Learning new languages is not an issue for most programmers; we have to learn new frameworks and languages every year or so if we want to keep up.
This is potentially hundreds of hours of wasted time that could be spent on other things. Even if someone absolutely hates Rust and doesn’t want to contribute to the massive amount of open issues on Lemmy, there are still a lot of front-ends that could use more contributors.
There are some projects that start because of “tech arrogance” as you describe the current situation. MariaDB, Git, LibreOffice are some of the most famous ones, but I’m sure there are more.
So while there’s plenty of talk in here (even from the core lemmy devs) about how much it makes sense and how much value there is in starting a new project with a different tech stack that includes Java, compared to simply contributing back to the current project that has momentum … and while that’s an interesting and important conversation …
Realistically, developers will make what they want to with what they want to (to a fault IMO, especially within the broader mission of the fediverse, but that’s besides the point). This project will happen, people will contribute and it may succeed.
So, to focus on the positives and what can be made good about this …
It’s great that there’s some sort of settling on a standard here and trying to be a “drop in replacement”. Continued commitments to consistency and interoperability would be awesome. While collaboration may be naturally limited, there’d still definitely be scope for it …
- ideas and designs, obviously
- Database management and optimisation, which is likely a big one.
- On that … AFAICT, SL is using MySQL? Can’t help but wonder (without knowing the technical justifications here) whether it would make much more sense to stick with the same DB unless there’s a good reason for divergence.
- Front ends and the API, another big one but one where the two projects could conceivably work together.
I’m likely being very naive here, but I can see both projects coming under a single umbrella or compact which provide different backends and maybe DB setups or schemas but otherwise share a good amount in design and mission.
However unlikely that is … trying not to fragment the fediverse too much would be awesome and its pleasant to see some dedication here to that end.
whether it would make much more sense to stick with the same DB unless there’s a good reason for divergence.
SL Dev said they reengineered the database schema and didn’t want to use the Lemmy one. Based on the summer performance issues, I guess it makes sense.
However unlikely that is … trying not to fragment the fediverse too much would be awesome and its pleasant to see some dedication here to that end.
At the end of the day, it’s still Activitypub. The compatibility between Lemmy and Kbin works pretty well, most of the issues we had were federation related, and those existed within Lemmy itself.
Well there’s still the question of using MySQL (?) rather than postgresql, where all manner of expertise about the DB can be useful to share. Not sure what kbin uses, but pgsql is pretty common around the fediverse.
And yea, it is all ActivityPub. I’m just not as faithful in that as others tend to be. It seems to be a fuzzy system that allows idiosyncrasies to creep in. Mastodon and Lemmy don’t get along too well and so sometimes AP just isn’t enough (I’ve just been trying to help someone whose masto instance seems not able to post to lemmy). At this moment, getting along is valuable for the platforms, for the fediverse and for us users.
Not sure whether this implementation will be lighter on resources than what Lemmy currently uses. Given the overhead of the JVM though, it’s unlikely it will be supported by, say, a single Raspberry Pi
JVM doesn’t have much overhead. Java 1.3 days are long gone.
I’ve been hearing a lot of good things for a while. Lookin forward to it.
