Based on what I’ve seen on the public facing part of the developer side, I get the feeling this isn’t the kind of group that can build the kind of organization required to make this sustainable in the long run.
I’m just waiting for when Beehaw releases that they’ve given up on Lemmy and have created a new tech stack.
I mention a new tech stack because Beehaw brought it up as an option and a lot of people have commented on the difficulty of development in this environment.
In terms of new tech stack currently theres sublinks being made by devs/admins of a bunch of instances (discuss.online, lemmy.world, programming.dev, etc.)
Not really a substantial opinion, but I have little hope that replacing a fairly well established Rust codebase with a brand new Java one will do much in terms of increasing contribution.
I wouldn’t shortchange how much making the barrier to entry lower can help. You have to fight Rust a lot to build anything complex, and that can have a chilling effect on contributions. This is not a dig at Rust; it has to force you to build things in a particular way because it has to guarantee memory safety at compile time. That isn’t to say that Rust’s approach is the only way to be sure your code is safe, mind you, just that Rust’s insistence on memory safety at compile time is constraining.
To be frank, this isn’t necessary most of the time, and Rust will force you to spend ages worrying about problems that may not apply to your project. Java gets a bad rap but it’s second only to Python in ease-of-use. When you’re working on an API-driven webapp, you really don’t need Rust’s efficiency as much as you need a well-defined architecture that people can easily contribute to.
I doubt it’ll magically fix everything on its own, but a combo of good contribution policies and a more approachable codebase might.
You have to fight Rust a lot to build anything complex
nutomic, one of the main Lemmy devs, didn’t know Rust before he started working on Lemmy. He just started working on Lemmy and learned Rust in the process. The difficulty of Rust is exaggerated.
Based on what I’ve seen on the public facing part of the developer side, I get the feeling this isn’t the kind of group that can build the kind of organization required to make this sustainable in the long run.
I’m just waiting for when Beehaw releases that they’ve given up on Lemmy and have created a new tech stack.
It’s open source. We don’t have to depend on the original developers.
If it gets too bad, someone can just make a fork.
Afaik people are just impatient with the developers and have different short term goals.
I mention a new tech stack because Beehaw brought it up as an option and a lot of people have commented on the difficulty of development in this environment.
That’d be disappointing. Rust seems like a great foundation.
It could still be rust. Code is always the easy part. Design and organization and funding are hard
The fact that I know you’re referring to the programming language called “Rust” doesn’t make this sentence any less funny.
In terms of new tech stack currently theres sublinks being made by devs/admins of a bunch of instances (discuss.online, lemmy.world, programming.dev, etc.)
Anything public yet and are they sticking to Rust?
Java spring for backend, Go for federation, Next.js for frontend
demo.sublinks.org has the backend with the lemmy-ui frontend to show api compatibility
Task list and progress is public on the github org https://github.com/orgs/sublinks/projects/1
Matrix space where all the devs talk is also public and you can see progress talked about in them
Not really a substantial opinion, but I have little hope that replacing a fairly well established Rust codebase with a brand new Java one will do much in terms of increasing contribution.
I wouldn’t shortchange how much making the barrier to entry lower can help. You have to fight Rust a lot to build anything complex, and that can have a chilling effect on contributions. This is not a dig at Rust; it has to force you to build things in a particular way because it has to guarantee memory safety at compile time. That isn’t to say that Rust’s approach is the only way to be sure your code is safe, mind you, just that Rust’s insistence on memory safety at compile time is constraining.
To be frank, this isn’t necessary most of the time, and Rust will force you to spend ages worrying about problems that may not apply to your project. Java gets a bad rap but it’s second only to Python in ease-of-use. When you’re working on an API-driven webapp, you really don’t need Rust’s efficiency as much as you need a well-defined architecture that people can easily contribute to.
I doubt it’ll magically fix everything on its own, but a combo of good contribution policies and a more approachable codebase might.
nutomic, one of the main Lemmy devs, didn’t know Rust before he started working on Lemmy. He just started working on Lemmy and learned Rust in the process. The difficulty of Rust is exaggerated.