this post was submitted on 23 Jan 2024
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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.
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
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.
This is quite an outdated view I would say.
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.
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.
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.
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
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.
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