The real benefit as I see it for using rust for backends is memory safety.
this post was submitted on 15 Jun 2023
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All the major languages for web backends are memory safe. Java, C#, etc
These are garbage collected languages and come with the overhead of such a process. Rust has no GC process and instead relies on reference counters to statically track live memory.
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As an aside, congratulations! This thread was cross posted to Hacker News:
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.
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.
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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’s difficult to get right
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).
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