The Abstract Wikipedia team has decided to rewrite the backend in Rust (www.wikifunctions.org)

submitted 2 months ago by lens0021@programming.dev to c/rust@programming.dev

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[-] Ephera@lemmy.ml 12 points 2 months ago

Apparently, Wikifunctions is a place to define e.g. mathematical formulas, so that they can be executed ad-hoc to provide insights about common questions.

Certainly makes sense to run those functions sandboxed in WebAssembly, since the function code is user-provided.
And then, yeah, I can imagine the process management making up a good amount of the complexity of their backend code...

[-] sukhmel@programming.dev 4 points 2 months ago

In this way, we can avoid relying on subprocesses and instead use threads (or, technically, asynchronous tasks) in Rust. Threads/tasks are much easier to manage

I believe, in their case cancelling a sync operation will not be a problem because they will not forever block on executing user-provided code, but cancelling a synchronous thread is not easy, afaik

[-] fnrir@lemmy.blahaj.zone 1 points 2 months ago

https://docs.rs/stop-thread/latest/stop_thread/fn.kill_thread_graceful.html

[-] Kissaki@programming.dev 3 points 2 months ago

Sharing, because I had to look up Abstract Wikipedia

Abstract Wikipedia is an in-development project of the Wikimedia Foundation. It aims to use Wikifunctions to create a language-independent version of Wikipedia using its structured data.