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.
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
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.
Rust is as much of a Java killer as C++ is. You could say Rust is the C++ killer, but I really don't see how Rust would be that comparable to Java, which operates at a higher level instead of memory and pointer management. IMO, Kotlin is the Java killer.
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
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.
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.
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”.
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.
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.
Not to mention a lot of massive companies also use it at every part of the stack, Rust is good at it all and it is beautifully and perfectly suited for tasks like these.
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.
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.
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.
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 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.
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.
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.
karma requirements and hashtags doesn’t seem right since the former will make people to farm karma for the requirements which is one of the reasons why newbies on reddit always dump post until they get a decent karma. lemmy is not a microblogging site, hashtags have better use in platforms like mastadon. post flairs should be implemented though.
hashtags have better use in platforms like mastadon
Says who? Because that’s how the old platforms used it? I think we should really be moving past the direct influence of these corporate platforms and on the fediverse that probably means something of a well understood common language (like @user or !group). Hashtags were only ever a thing on twitter because the users just started using them and full text search was sufficient to handle it (this is more or less the position we’re in on lemmy). Direct support didn’t come till much later.
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.
With regards to hashtags I think the utility is mostly in searching among similar things within a community. Suppose there’s a community that serves a purpose like r/askhistorians, stackexchange, or like what I’m trying to do over at !opencourselectures. In each of those cases, it is enormously useful to be able to search the community by subtopic. Obviously, this could be solved in other ways, but hashtags are probably the simplest to understand and implement.
Very excited to see the outcome of your Ibis project, but I think Lemmy native wikis would see significantly more activity. The easiest implementation I can imagine is a slightly altered frontend for communities marked wikis that also handle some well known syntax (like [[link]] popularized by pkm systems) for internal links. That is links to posts by the same name within a community.
Currently, I’m working on a lemmy bot that handles exactly this internal linking, and hashtag functionality, then builds a static site with support for github pages (so the end result is both a linked community and a seperate site), but I’d much rather have this functionality built into lemmy. To be frank, I’d much rather be trying to build this functionality into lemmy and if I wasn’t nearly certain it’d get shot down as out-of-scope, I’d probably be doing that.
I know you’re not particularly fond of growth based arguments for new features, but I sincerely believe that the thing that made reddit great in those early days was the tendency for communities to compile resources (particularly for niche and hobby communities). This gave the communities a certain depth that is nearly impossible with posts alone. If that were a first-class feature of Lemmy, I think you’d very quickly see Lemmy fill the niche that federated wiki projects and supplementary wiki services have so far failed to.
Then hashtags would have the same use as post tags on Reddit. I think thats a cleaner solution and there are plans to implement it.
Lemmy is already a very complicated project, and adding more functionality will only make it harder to maintain. Also there are lots of people who use wikis without Reddit, Wikipedia is one of the biggest websites in the world after all. So a Fediverse alternative is very much needed. Plus Lemmy and Ibis can federate in the future.
I have higher hopes. Java is three times more developers than Rust (statista.com/…/worldwide-developer-survey-most-us…), and you can see in this thread a number of people saying they could contribute as they know Java and not Rust.
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?
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.
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?
A lot of languages have it available as a valid return value for most things, implicitly. This also means you have to do extra checking or something like this will blow up with an exception:
There are a ton of solutions out there. Many languages have added null-coalescing and null-conditional operators – which are a shorthand for things like the above solutions. Some languages have removed the implicit nulls (like Kotlin), requiring them to be explicitly marked in their type. Some languages have a wrapper around nullable values, an Option type. Some languages remove null entirely from the language (I believe Rust falls into this, using an option type in place of).
Not having null isn’t particularly common yet, and isn’t something languages can just change due to breaking backwards compatibility. However, languages have been adding features over time to make nulls less painful, and most have some subset of the above as options to help.
I do think Option types are fantastic solutions, making you deal with the issue that a none/empty type can exist in a particular place. Java has had them for basically 10 years now (since Java 8).
<span style="color:#323232;">// optional example
</span><span style="color:#323232;">
</span><span style="color:#323232;">Class Person {
</span><span style="color:#323232;"> private String address;
</span><span style="color:#323232;">
</span><span style="color:#323232;"> //prefer this if a null could ever be returned
</span><span style="color:#323232;"> public Optional<String> getAddress() {
</span><span style="color:#323232;"> return Optional.ofNullable(address);
</span><span style="color:#323232;"> }
</span><span style="color:#323232;">
</span><span style="color:#323232;"> // not this
</span><span style="color:#323232;"> public String getAddress() {
</span><span style="color:#323232;"> return address;
</span><span style="color:#323232;"> }
</span>
When consuming, it makes you have to handle the null case, which you can do a variety of ways.
<span style="font-style:italic;color:#969896;">// set a default
</span><span style="color:#0086b3;">String</span><span style="color:#323232;"> address </span><span style="font-weight:bold;color:#a71d5d;">=</span><span style="color:#323232;"> person.getAddress().orElse(</span><span style="color:#183691;">"default value"</span><span style="color:#323232;">);
</span><span style="color:#323232;">
</span><span style="font-style:italic;color:#969896;">// explicitly throw an exception instead of an implicit NullPointerException as before
</span><span style="color:#0086b3;">String</span><span style="color:#323232;"> address </span><span style="font-weight:bold;color:#a71d5d;">=</span><span style="color:#323232;"> person.getAddress().orElseThrow(</span><span style="color:#0086b3;">SomeException</span><span style="color:#323232;">::new);
</span><span style="color:#323232;">
</span><span style="font-style:italic;color:#969896;">// use in a closure only if it exists
</span><span style="color:#323232;">person.getAddress().ifPresent(addr </span><span style="font-weight:bold;color:#a71d5d;">-></span><span style="color:#323232;"> logger.debug(</span><span style="color:#183691;">"Address {}"</span><span style="color:#323232;">, addr));
</span><span style="color:#323232;">
</span><span style="font-style:italic;color:#969896;">// first example, map to modify, and returning default if no value
</span><span style="color:#0086b3;">String</span><span style="color:#323232;"> address </span><span style="font-weight:bold;color:#a71d5d;">=</span><span style="color:#323232;"> person.getAddress().map(</span><span style="color:#0086b3;">String</span><span style="color:#323232;">::toUpperCase).orElse(</span><span style="color:#183691;">""</span><span style="color:#323232;">);
</span>
Thanks but I’m a network engineer, I’m just saying your argument is pointless, the majority of devs support a certain language. How they or you feel about it doesn’t matter one bit.
Oh great so you hammer boxes and wires together to make lights flash. Well done on that. Maybe leave the discussion of programming to the people with keyboard skills?
How they or you feel about it doesn’t matter one bit.
No, how I feel is very important because I am very important.
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
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.
You’re delusional if you believe people care about Nim. It has been around for 16 years and is still nothing in comparison to Java. Java won’t go anywhere and is here to stay.
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
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.
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: …pages.debian.net/…/python3-java.html
You can switch to Kotlin Native, which depends on C libraries, or Kotlin JS, which depends on whatever libraries your JS runner has. No matter whatever Oracle has done, they produce a pretty good library, API spec and OpenJDK.
C# is regularly under-represented in OSS, in part because for most of it’s existence, the primary implementation (.NET Framework) was not open source or cross platform. It is also very popular in fields where open source is not the norm (game development, bespoke backend infrastructure, embedded apps).
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.
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.
You always get a Result. On that result you can call result.unwrap() (give me the bool or crash) or result.unwrap_or_default() (give me bool or false if there was error) or any other way you can think of. The point is that Rust won’t let you get value out of that Result until you somehow didn’t handle possible failure. If function does not return Result and returns just value directly, you (as a function caller) are guaranteed to always get a value, you can rely on there not being a failure that the function didn’t handle internally.
That’s a kinda terrible way to do it compared to letting it bubble up to the global error handler.
You can also use optional in java if you want a similar pattern but that only makes sense for stuff where it’s not guaranteed that you get back the data you want such as db or web fetch
You can bubble up the Error with ?operator. It just has to be explicit (function that wants to use ? must return Result) so that the code up the stack is aware that it will receive Result which might be Err. The function also has defined Error type, so you know exactly which errors you might receive. (So you’re not surprised by unexpected exception type from somewhere deep in the call stack. Not sure about Java, but in Python that is quite a pain)
Edit: To provide an example for the mentioned db fetch. Typically your query function would return Result(Option). (So Err if there was error, Ok(None) if there was no error, but query returned no results and Ok(Some(results)) if there were results) This is pretty nice to work with, because you can distinguish between “error” and “no resurts” if you want, but you can also decide to handle these same way with:
So I have the option to handle the error if it’s something I can handle and then the error handling isn’t standing in my way. There are no try-catch blocks, I just declare what to (not) do with the error. Or I can decide it’s better handled up the stack:
This would be similar to exception bubbling up, but my function has to explicitly return Result and you can see in the code where the “exception” is bubbled up rather than bubbling up due to absence of any handler. In terms predictability I personally find this more predictable.
But like, what kind of error are you gonna handle that’s coming from the DB, if it’s something like a connection error because the DB is down, then you are shit out of luck you can’t handle that anyway, and you probably shouldn’t, not from the layer you are calling your DB from, that’s a higher level logic, so bubbling Errors there make sense.
and if it’s an “error” like findById doesn’t always return something, that’s what the Optional pattern is for.
what you have described to me seems like a worse version of the checked/unchecked exception system.
If function does not return Result and returns just value directly, you (as a function caller) are guaranteed to always get a value, you can rely on there not being a failure that the function didn’t handle internally.
The difference being where you handle the error?
It sounds to me like Java works in kinda the same way. You either use throws Exception and require the caller to handle the exception when it occurs, or you handle it yourself and return whatever makes sense when that happens (or whatever you want to do before you do a return). The main difference being how the error is delivered.
Yeah I suppose ignoring unchecked exceptions, it’s pretty similar situation, although the guarantees are a bit stronger in Rust IMO as the fallibility is always in the function signature.
Ergonomically I personally like Result more than exceptions. You can work with it like with any other enum including things like result.ok() which gives you Option. (similar to java Optional I think) There is some syntactic sugar like the ? operator, that will just let you bubble the error up the stack (assuming the return type of the function is also Result) - ie: maybe_do_something()?. But it really is just Enum, so you can do Enum-y things with it:
<span style="color:#323232;">// similar to try-catch, but you can do this with any Enum
</span><span style="color:#323232;">if let Ok(value) = maybe_do_something() {
</span><span style="color:#323232;"> println!("Value is {}", value)
</span><span style="color:#323232;">}
</span><span style="color:#323232;">
</span><span style="color:#323232;">// Call closure on Ok variant, return 0 if any of the two function fails
</span><span style="color:#323232;">let some_number = maybe_number()
</span><span style="color:#323232;"> .and_then(|number| process_number_perhaps(number)) // this can also fail
</span><span style="color:#323232;"> .unwrap_or(0);
</span>
In that sense it’s very similar to java’s Optional if it could also carry the Exception value and if it was mandatory for any fallible function.
Also (this is besides the point) Result in Rust is just compile-time “zero cost” abstraction. It does not actually compile to any code in the binary. I’m not familiar with Java, but I think at least the unchecked exceptions introduce runtime cost?
And there’s many other awesome ways to use a Result including turning it into an Option or unwrapping it unsafely. I recommend you just search “Rust book” on your search engine and browse it. Here’s the docs to the Result enum.
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.
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.
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.
And yet it’s still a better option than 90% of languages out there.
Trendy languages are great until they break something or lose support. Java is consistent, and that’s the most important part.
You sound like some Java dev personally offended you so much that you can’t separate the language from a person you hate for completely irrelevant reasons.
Like I said, I’ll take Java and extreme OOP over Python/Rust/Go any day of the week because it’s actually readable code instead of a clusterfuck of hundreds of methods in one file
The only reason you don’t like Rust is it’s the first language in a long time that’s threatened the dominance of C, the bedrock of programming. If it can do that then Java is going to be under threat too. Go failed cos it’s a shit language and Python isn’t even the same category. Java is more readable than Python? You’re having a laugh or you’ve never seen a friggin line of Python in your life.
Python:
<span style="color:#323232;">for i in range(1, 10):
</span><span style="color:#323232;"> print("Hello: ", i)
</span>
10 lines vs 2. And you think Java is more readable?
Back in the day Java couldn’t even handle concatenating strings and numbers and needed you to fucking convert the integer into a string beforehand (String.valueOf()). I see it only took you about 20 fucking years to figure out something most other languages had out of the box.
What’s with all the unnecessary braces? The semicolons? Punctuation causes blindness and coldsores. Java is a cancer and it’s devs should be shot and their bodies piled high before being tipped into the sea.
Ok, so now build an api that can handle 100k iops with a cache, db calls and everything else, and tell me how simple that is in Python.
Java and Python, like any programming languages don’t do everything well. They do a few things well, and most things adequately. Python is great for scripting and small applications, but once you’re hundreds of files into a corporate software project it becomes near unreadable. Java is great for large scale applications but suffers if you want to make a single purpose app.
I’d also argue that yes, the Java is more readable at scale. Everything is explicitly typed, braces are so much better than indents (is something 20 indents or 21 idents deep, I never know), semicolons are useful for delineating ends of statements.
It sounds like your only expose was Java in uni and have never worked with anything at scale.
is something 20 indents or 21 idents deep, I never know
You don’t know because you’re a mongoloid who’s never heard of an IDE or a well configured text editor. Stop blaming your own inadequacies on tools and accept the fact you’re a shit dev.
Like I said - Python and Java are different categories so I agree they aren’t competing. But you do know Dropbox, Netflix and Reddit are built in Python don’t you?
However, Rust and Java are competing and that scares you. Because Rust has all the benefits of Java with none of the downsides. The only benefit Java has (like COBOL) is inertia. Even Google want rid of Java and it’s why they created Kotlin.
Java has reached it’s zenith and s in decline. It’s only a matter of time before tech debt and new concepts kill the language off and it goes the way of COBOL and Fortran.
Just accept it with grace and stop fighting the inevitable.
I genuinely could not give a shit about Rust. It doesn’t scare me, because just like COBAL, Java isn’t going anywhere. An IDE helps, but it’s no easier visually than checking if something is within a pair of brackets.
I’m not saying you can’t do it with Python, just that it gets exponentially more complicated as you do so. Just like you can build single purpose tiny applications in java, you can build massive ones in python.
Rust and Java aren’t competing outside of Silicon Valley and Big Tech, and even they often still use a significant amount Java in legacy tech. Rust still can’t replicate everything that libraries and plugins for Java can, it’s still not a fully mature development stack, it’s close, but it’s far from becoming the next java.
Java isn’t a perfect language, I never said it was. I’m standing by my comment that it’s better than 90% of the languages out there.
This is the kind of bizarre rhetoric I’ve come to expect from a Java dev so badly addled with Java-brain-rot that they don’t even know how to write their own name anymore.
Rust and Java aren’t competing outside of Silicon Valley and Big Tech,
Keep telling yourself that but I’m not the only one here saying Lemmy and Rust has a lot more chance at success. Parts of Mozilla are written in Rust with a view to replacing all of the codebase in it. Parts of Linux and Linux drivers are being built in Rust. Small programs like Exa (ls replacement) in Linux are written in Rust. Google replaced Java with Go.
Rust, Go and others are taking over. People have seen the light. Those of us with enough cognitive function left in tact are making moves to languages that matter and away from Java.
You’re right Java will always be around just like COBOL. In about two mainframes managed by two COBOL devs in the entire world.
It’s sad to see you like this. Arguing for your own abuse and misery at the hands of a language that doesn’t care about you.
My guy, you’re the one getting all worked up here. I’m just providing thought out responses.
You’re proving my point. Everything you mentioned is Silicon Valley/Big Tech. The only place it’s being used is big tech. And yes, Linux does count. That’s fine, but it’s still nowhere near replacing Java.
My goal is to be out of software in under 20 years. It’s a soul sucking, terrible job that takes the life out of you. So it really doesn’t matter what you think is coming in the future. Java works 100% of the time for my use cases, and there will always be Java jobs available.
Also I’d kill to be an experienced COBAL dev. They can write their own checks doing 40hrs a week of barely anything at banks. It’d be the dream job.
I’m not a programmer for fun 99% of the time. I don’t care what’s “cool” or “hot” or “trending”. I care about what keeps me employed.
I’m sure not miserable writing Java code. I definitely am writing Python. So I really don’t care about your opinions. They’re not backed by anything but hurt feelings.
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.
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
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.
It seems to be more language focused than hard to PR against the main repo.
Java is much more widely known than Rust, which means a much larger pool of developers. I never contributed to the original Lemmy server because I couldn’t wrap my head around a full production scale rust project. I’ll very likely contribute to this because I work with production Java code daily. Im sure I’m not the only other dev who has run into this.
Also maybe there’s just too many disagreements with the Lemmy owners, who are a bit extreme for a lot of people.
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.
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.
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.
If I were to guess, it’s not recent grads making those posts. I got the sense those comments were coming from people who had been around for a while. Folks who are now senior enough to be trapped in draining meetings all day, and have to manage a family a night.
The work day and home life can get longer and more exhausting the further the older you get.
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, same boat. I’m continuously learning new shit with C# and I’m starting to understand Angular after all these years. I could switch back to Java with few issues.
I would love to learn Rust, but there’s no time right now.
Exactly this. It’s often about finding the right balance between technically optimal, and socially feasible (lacking the right phrase here).
The nerds brimming with technical expertise often neglect the second point.
Oh - wow! I was about to complain about how join-lemmy.org is a shining bad example in this regard, talking about server stuff right away and hiding how Lemmy actually looks until page 3, but apparently they changed that and improved it drastically. Cool, good job!
Anyways.
For collaborative projects especially, it is important to strike a balance between tech and social aspects. Making poor tech choices will put people off. But making your project less accessible will also result in less people joining. It’s crucial to find a good balance here. For many coming from the tech side, this usually means making far more concessions to the social side than intuitively feels right.
Once you know a few languages and the principles for how a computer works moving to a new one is easy. Don’t think of it as being a “Java developer”, but a programmer. It’s just a tool.
We did not learn languages at uni, but concepts. You use the same data structures and algorithms.
I think you’d be surprised, try picking up rust for some advent of code challenges. If you know Java Streams and C/C++ lower level programming all that you’re missing is some pattern matching.
Anyone can quickly learn how to solve some code challenges in a new language.
It’s a completely different story to learn how to write long lived enterprise scale programs that can grow with multiple independent contributors. This takes a lifetime to learn. More people have more experience to do it with Java.
I know Java and I am learning C#, I don’t feel like I can just send a few hours and be at the same level as I am with Java. There are a lot of things I do not know or understand yet with C#.
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.
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