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?
Learning rust is hard, yeah. But I’ve found that once you get the hang of it, actually using rust and writing code day to day is as fast or faster than using other languages (Jacascript, Pythong, etc). Rust tells you exactly what you did wrong and why it’s dangerous, this is incredibly useful in avoiding bugs and speeds up productivity. Therefore, I have no doubt the main creators of Lemmy have issues with writing rust code.
I agree that finding developers can be hard, though. Especially since rust is still a relatively new language. I also agree that new programmers who recently came to lemmy and want to help it succeed by contributing code will take a good bit of time to get to that point of ‘being comfortable enough with rust that it increases productivity’. However, I also think we have to consider the inverse, that the influx of new users will also see experienced rust programmers who want to help contribute to Lemmy and be successful at it (and in fact I think we’ve already seen this if I take Lemmy PR activity as any indication). Indeed even the rust subreddit stickied protest post hinted that rust developers are among the few who can help enact new alternative platforms to Reddit, and there are definitely OG and amazing programmers in that community.
That’s also not mentioning that rust has continued to gain traction and is continually one of the most favorite languages for devs (according to stackoverflow)
TL;DR: I’m a rust optimist and have faith in the rust community to help out Lemmy where it matters.
Source: been rust dev for 4+ years, do it for day job. Also considering helping out Lemmy when my life becomes a little bit less crazy
Lemmyrs/rustlang for rust instance btw