Programming

17313 readers

252 users here now

Welcome to the main community in programming.dev! Feel free to post anything relating to programming here!

Cross posting is strongly encouraged in the instance. If you feel your post or another person's post makes sense in another community cross post into it.

Hope you enjoy the instance!

Rules

Follow the programming.dev instance rules
Keep content related to programming in some way
If you're posting long videos try to add in some form of tldr for those who don't want to watch videos

Wormhole

Follow the wormhole through a path of communities [email protected]

founded 2 years ago

MODERATORS

[email protected]

189

Does Lemmy really benefit from Rust? Is code execution speed the bottleneck? (programming.dev)

submitted 1 year ago* (last edited 1 year ago) by [email protected] to c/[email protected]

150 comments fedilink hide all child comments

My first experience with Lemmy was thinking that the UI was beautiful, and lemmy.ml (the first instance I looked at) was asking people not to join because they already had 1500 users and were struggling to scale.

1500 users just doesn't seem like much, it seems like the type of load you could handle with a Raspberry Pi in a dusty corner.

Are the Lemmy servers struggling to scale because of the federation process / protocols?

Maybe I underestimate how much compute goes into hosting user generated content? Users generate very little text, but uploading pictures takes more space. Users are generating millions of bytes of content and it's overloading computers that can handle billions of bytes with ease, what happened? Am I missing something here?

Or maybe the code is just inefficient?

Which brings me to the title's question: Does Lemmy benefit from using Rust? None of the problems I can imagine are related to code execution speed.

If the federation process and protocols are inefficient, then everything is being built on sand. Popular protocols are hard to change. How often does the HTTP protocol change? Never. The language used for the code doesn't matter in this case.

If the code is just inefficient, well, inefficient Rust is probably slower than efficient Python or JavaScript. Could the complexity of Rust have pushed the devs towards a simpler but less efficient solution that ends up being slower than garbage collected languages? I'm sure this has happened before, but I don't know anything about the Lemmy code.

Or, again, maybe I'm just underestimating the amount of compute required to support 1500 users sharing a little bit of text and a few images?

you are viewing a single comment's thread
view the rest of the comments

[–] [email protected] -2 points 1 year ago* (last edited 1 year ago) (13 children)

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.

[–] johnofthesea 2 points 1 year ago

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).

load more comments (12 replies)