this post was submitted on 06 Aug 2023
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Announcements

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Official announcements from the Lemmy project. Subscribe to this community or add it to your RSS reader in order to be notified about new releases and important updates.

You can also find major news on join-lemmy.org

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This is an opportunity for any users, server admins, or interested third parties to ask anything they'd like to @[email protected] and I about Lemmy. This includes its development and future, as well as wider issues relevant to the social media landscape today.

Note: This will be the thread tmrw, so you can use this thread to ask and vote on questions beforehand.

Original Announcement thread

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[–] [email protected] 31 points 1 year ago (2 children)

Why did you choose Rust for the backend and Inferno for the frontend?

P.S. Thank you for your work!

[–] [email protected] 27 points 1 year ago (1 children)

Performance.

For web services, check out https://www.techempower.com/benchmarks/

For front-end, check out https://github.com/krausest/js-framework-benchmark

At the time of making lemmy, actix (for back end), and inferno, were two of the highest-performing in their areas.

[–] [email protected] 7 points 1 year ago* (last edited 1 year ago)

Thank you for your reply!

I wonder how much experience you had with those technologies beforehand.

Edit: found the answers about Rust here and here. Impressive! Would it be reasonable to assume that y'all didn't have much prior experience with Inferno as well as you appear to be very quick and eager learners?

[–] [email protected] 19 points 1 year ago (2 children)

Why did you choose ... Inferno for the frontend?

As someone who's made many contributions I wonder about this very often.

Piggybacking off of the question I'm commenting on: what influenced your decision to use a rust WASM framework for the rewrite instead of something comparable that uses more well known web technologies, like next or sveltkit?

[–] [email protected] 20 points 1 year ago (1 children)

Rust is just a much more enjoyable language to work with than javascript / typescript, and its been voted developers favorite language on stackoverflow for like 6+ years for good reason. When I made jerboa (in kotlin), it made me realize how awful it is working in javascript, even compared to a JVM based language.

I'd been waiting for a long time for a good web framework in rust, so when sycamore / perseus / leptos came up, I made a few small sample projects, and loved working with them.

Also leptos's first class support for 4 different isomorphic/SSR modes, and its performance, made me choose that. Its essentially sveltkit, but for Rust.

[–] [email protected] 17 points 1 year ago (1 children)

After learning enough Rust to do some things I definitely agree with you regarding it being an awesome language to work with. My main concern is with ease to contribute by non-maintainers as shown in the other reply to my comment, and it's not the first time I've seen the sentiment. However, maybe having lemmy's official web UI be in leptos will both help to popularize the framework and encourage frontend devs to become proficient in a language other than JavaScript.

[–] [email protected] 10 points 1 year ago

For sure. The leptos devs and community have already been helping with a ton of issues I've been having with some smaller leptos projects I've been using to teach myself. I'm really excited about its potential, and hope it grows.

[–] [email protected] 7 points 1 year ago

Would definitely love to see more web-platform friendly frontend tech used, like Svelte. It would also make contributing to the frontend much easier imo.