Lemmy is in serious need of more devs [CROSS POST]

cross-posted from: https://beehaw.org/post/570507

After the (temporary) defederation announcement of earlier i checked the Lemmy repo to see if there was already a ticket on the federation limiting option like Mastodon’s that people mentioned Lemmy doesn’t yet have. Not only i didn’t find it, i also saw that there’s about 200+ open tickets of variable importance. Also saw that it’s maintained mostly by the two main devs, the difference in commits between them and even the next contributors is vast. This is normal and in other circumstances it’d grow organically, but considering the huge influx of users lately, which will likely take months to slow down, they just don’t have the same time to invest on this, and many things risk being neglected. I’m a sysadmin, haven’t coded anything big in at least a decade and a half beyond small helper scripts in Bash or Python, and haven’t ever touched Rust, so can’t help there, but maybe some of you Rust aficionados can give some time to help essentially all of Lemmy. The same can be said of Kbin of course, although that’s PHP, and there is exacerbated by it being just the single dev.

PrincipleOfCharity,

I’m not super concerned. It’s been a little over a week since stuff hit the fan. Contributors need time to learn the code base. People are starting to help with the easy stuff, but the two main devs still need to check everything because they are the only ones that can understand how those changes affect long term visions. Also, the urgent fixes are all somewhat-breaking changes which is why it’s looking like the next release is going to be 0.18 instead of 0.17.5. It makes sense to get as many urgent breaking changes in as they can before publishing, and it’s only been 8 days since the last release to identify, code, and test.

savoy,
@savoy@lemmygrad.ml avatar

I've been meaning to keep practicing Rust to hopefully contribute (since 2020), but I never have enough time :/ I'm hoping towards the end of the year I'll have time to get back into it; I could even have time to start the few side projects I've kept off!

Aloso,

i also saw that there’s about 200+ open tickets of variable importance

Note that it is normal that the number of open issues grows faster than issues are resolved. For example, rust-lang/rust has 8,963 open issues and 39,803 closed issues. microsoft/TypeScript has 6,001 open issues and 31,397 closed issues. A large number of open issues isn't necessarily concerning, unless high-priority issues (vulnerabilities and critical bugs) stay open for a long time.

thesanewriter,

I spent the latter portion of the day learning Rust and starting work on a new Lemmy feature. Hopefully it won't take long to get it fully functional.

hardypart,

I can't tell if this is satire, lol

zzzthelastuser,

Sounds sincere to me. I don't think he meant he just started learning rust from hello world the other day and now wants to improve lemmy.

thesanewriter,

Oh yeah, I'm actually a software engineer. I had experience with C and Java, as well as some higher-level languages like Javascript and Python, so for learning Rust it has mainly moreso been learning which function is in which library and how the syntax for the language works, rather than learning programming fundamentals.

barsoap,

Oh my sweet summer child :)

Remember that borrowck is not out to hurt you, it wants to help you, guide you towards enlightenment, and does so with grandfatherly kindness: Making you feel completely stupid.

If you hit a wall make sure to check out the Rust book and work through it, or at least read it: Unless your language background is very specific (let's see C/Pascal or such, plus Haskell, plus very obscure research-grade ML dialects with region-based memory management) Rust semantics are going to kick your ass sooner or later.

ehrenschwan,

I just started writing more rust code. And until now the borrowck only has been useful. The suggestions inside of the lsp feel like magic. Other lsps only scream at you when you've done something wrong. The rust lsp tells you how to do it right. And sometimes with such a high level of understanding of what I've written, it almost feels like a pair programmer.

barsoap,

Things definitely got better with non-lexical lifetimes, yes, and that might be the reason that we don't see that many complaints about it, any more.

...but not because it won't at some point be an obstinate bridge troll pointing you in exactly the wrong direction actively hindering you from figuring out what you did wrong (without understanding the underlying semantics), but because people actually had positive interactions with it before, thus not immediately judging it all bad. But it's going to get you, too, just wait for it. It's looming, lurking, in the depths of the compiler, ready to strike when you least suspect :)

derivator,

Oh my sweet summer child :)

Can we stop with this condescending nonsense?

barsoap,

Can we stop tone-policing friendly heads-up? It's all a long-winded recommendation and reminder to go back to the Rust book if (or rather when) you get stuck.

Even Bryan Cantrill ended up reading through the book, going step by step. There's no shame to it.

derivator,

I don't find "Oh my sweet summer child :)" all that friendly, I find it condescending and weird. Recommending the Rust book I have no issue with.

barsoap,

It means as much as "You have not yet experienced the hardships I have, and therefore have an idealistic view of things".

As to weird well yes it's a Game of Thrones reference.

druppel,

I was thinking about learning rust and contribute to open source projects, so it might be a good option. I do have a laundry list of notes about the platform itself though

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