My first experience with Lemmy was thinking that the UI was beautiful, and lemmy.ml (the first instance I looked at) was asking people not to join because they already had 1500 users and were struggling to scale.
1500 users just doesn’t seem like much, it seems like the type of load you could handle with a Raspberry Pi in a dusty corner.
Are the Lemmy servers struggling to scale because of the federation process / protocols?
Maybe I underestimate how much compute goes into hosting user generated content? Users generate very little text, but uploading pictures takes more space. Users are generating millions of bytes of content and it’s overloading computers that can handle billions of bytes with ease, what happened? Am I missing something here?
Or maybe the code is just inefficient?
Which brings me to the title’s question: Does Lemmy benefit from using Rust? None of the problems I can imagine are related to code execution speed.
If the federation process and protocols are inefficient, then everything is being built on sand. Popular protocols are hard to change. How often does the HTTP protocol change? Never. The language used for the code doesn’t matter in this case.
If the code is just inefficient, well, inefficient Rust is probably slower than efficient Python or JavaScript. Could the complexity of Rust have pushed the devs towards a simpler but less efficient solution that ends up being slower than garbage collected languages? I’m sure this has happened before, but I don’t know anything about the Lemmy code.
Or, again, maybe I’m just underestimating the amount of compute required to support 1500 users sharing a little bit of text and a few images?
Hear me out, but I believe that using Rust holds Lemmy back.
Writing Rust code is difficult, and fairly time consuming. It’s difficult to get right, and as other commenters have noted, Lemmy code seems to do a lot of things for the “hype factor” (like Websockets). It’s difficult to find enough devs as well.
The article about Discord switching to Rust from Go in the top comment is misleading in my opinion. They totally rearchitected their service while rewriting it, so it’s an apples to oranges comparision.
Rust isn’t difficult to get right. JavaScript is difficult to get right. That’s because Rust tells you when you get it wrong, and JavaScript doesn’t.
Learning rust is hard, yeah. But I’ve found that once you get the hang of it, actually using rust and writing code day to day is as fast or faster than using other languages (Jacascript, Pythong, etc). Rust tells you exactly what you did wrong and why it’s dangerous, this is incredibly useful in avoiding bugs and speeds up productivity. Therefore, I have no doubt the main creators of Lemmy have issues with writing rust code.
I agree that finding developers can be hard, though. Especially since rust is still a relatively new language. I also agree that new programmers who recently came to lemmy and want to help it succeed by contributing code will take a good bit of time to get to that point of ‘being comfortable enough with rust that it increases productivity’. However, I also think we have to consider the inverse, that the influx of new users will also see experienced rust programmers who want to help contribute to Lemmy and be successful at it (and in fact I think we’ve already seen this if I take Lemmy PR activity as any indication). Indeed even the rust subreddit stickied protest post hinted that rust developers are among the few who can help enact new alternative platforms to Reddit, and there are definitely OG and amazing programmers in that community.
That’s also not mentioning that rust has continued to gain traction and is continually one of the most favorite languages for devs (according to stackoverflow)
TL;DR: I’m a rust optimist and have faith in the rust community to help out Lemmy where it matters.
Source: been rust dev for 4+ years, do it for day job. Also considering helping out Lemmy when my life becomes a little bit less crazy
Lemmyrs/rustlang for rust instance btw
On the other hand, Rust is fairly resilient. The issues Lemmy is experiencing wouldn’t be fixed in Python vs Java, it’s more of an architectural constraint. Those issues, experienced devs can fix mostly regardless of language.
If your college educated in cs, and your main issue with a codebase is the language its writen in, i have some serious questions as to how the hell you graduated
Different languages do excel at different architectures / designs. Either through performance or how the code is written.
But yeah, sometimes people make too much of a deal of which language something is written in. And it becomes a discussion of trends or personal favorites instead.
I bet the hardest thing is finding devs who are actually proficient in Rust.
A rudimentary way to put it but ultimately correct.
Rust has already established itself as a solid language. That should be the first bell.
I mean most CS courses don’t teach you to code or what a project should look like. It’s why the mentality in most professional work is to pretty much forget everything you learned in college and you’ll be trained on the job.
Ha! They are ditching Websockets in the next release. Good riddance.
But Rust is modern. The only real alternatives would be Go or Javascript, Go has a lot more footguns IMO, and Javascript has its own issues with the type system, etc.
The main issues you’re talking about are in the lemmy-ui which is not written in Rust, but in InfernoJS / Typescript.
Most every language in use gets pretty constant new releases so is effectively modern. So not sure why the criteria should be a hype language versus simply the best language for the job (performance level, dev time, dev availability, etc.).
I think you are getting things backwards… Learning to write rust might be hard, if you are not used to typed languages or languages with explicit memory management with stack/heap separation. However, writing rust is not hard. It might take slightly longer in the coding phase, since you are forced to do things correct, you need to handle errors and are not allowed to share data between threads in dangerous ways aso. But that makes the resulting software a lot better, which means that the testing and support is a lot less. So, if anything, the net result of writing software in rust is that it is easier, since you are not allowed to shoot your self in the foot over and over again.
And remember, that every time rust is making your life difficult, you might have introduced a subtle bug in another language.
The only issue I had with Rust is missing libraries.
Whenever I have to go back to Python, a language I used for over 10 years, my productivity goes down.
Rust is by far the best language I worked with and after going through the CS curriculum in uni, learning Rust taken a few hours here in there in my free time.
It is actually really easy. I wanted to rewrite my old rust coded that I did while I was learning it. But when I checked it after about year I have found that it was pretty decent.
Compiler really did help (actually more like clippy/rust-analyzer in that case).