Not really a substantial opinion, but I have little hope that replacing a fairly well established Rust codebase with a brand new Java one will do much in terms of increasing contribution.
Theres been a bunch of activity and people joining in in the dev matrix already
Backend pretty much already has parity and the frontend is currently the main thing that an updated demo is waiting on but should be ready really soon
I’ve been designing an updated home page recently for it that I’ll be pushing out this week that looks miles better than lemmy-ui since I could do everything from scratch and thus quickly
I wouldn’t shortchange how much making the barrier to entry lower can help. You have to fight Rust a lot to build anything complex, and that can have a chilling effect on contributions. This is not a dig at Rust; it has to force you to build things in a particular way because it has to guarantee memory safety at compile time. That isn’t to say that Rust’s approach is the only way to be sure your code is safe, mind you, just that Rust’s insistence on memory safety at compile time is constraining.
To be frank, this isn’t necessary most of the time, and Rust will force you to spend ages worrying about problems that may not apply to your project. Java gets a bad rap but it’s second only to Python in ease-of-use. When you’re working on an API-driven webapp, you really don’t need Rust’s efficiency as much as you need a well-defined architecture that people can easily contribute to.
I doubt it’ll magically fix everything on its own, but a combo of good contribution policies and a more approachable codebase might.
You have to fight Rust a lot to build anything complex
nutomic, one of the main Lemmy devs, didn’t know Rust before he started working on Lemmy. He just started working on Lemmy and learned Rust in the process. The difficulty of Rust is exaggerated.
Not really a substantial opinion, but I have little hope that replacing a fairly well established Rust codebase with a brand new Java one will do much in terms of increasing contribution.
Theres been a bunch of activity and people joining in in the dev matrix already
Backend pretty much already has parity and the frontend is currently the main thing that an updated demo is waiting on but should be ready really soon
I’ve been designing an updated home page recently for it that I’ll be pushing out this week that looks miles better than lemmy-ui since I could do everything from scratch and thus quickly
I wouldn’t shortchange how much making the barrier to entry lower can help. You have to fight Rust a lot to build anything complex, and that can have a chilling effect on contributions. This is not a dig at Rust; it has to force you to build things in a particular way because it has to guarantee memory safety at compile time. That isn’t to say that Rust’s approach is the only way to be sure your code is safe, mind you, just that Rust’s insistence on memory safety at compile time is constraining.
To be frank, this isn’t necessary most of the time, and Rust will force you to spend ages worrying about problems that may not apply to your project. Java gets a bad rap but it’s second only to Python in ease-of-use. When you’re working on an API-driven webapp, you really don’t need Rust’s efficiency as much as you need a well-defined architecture that people can easily contribute to.
I doubt it’ll magically fix everything on its own, but a combo of good contribution policies and a more approachable codebase might.
nutomic, one of the main Lemmy devs, didn’t know Rust before he started working on Lemmy. He just started working on Lemmy and learned Rust in the process. The difficulty of Rust is exaggerated.