Right now, I’m feeling concerned and wondering what is going on in regards to Sublinks here, since I have created a community for discussion on koalas about a week ago on here and have started and been doing work on it recently. But now I’m hearing about Sublinks and feeling concerned if I created it on the wrong instance or the wrong platform since I’m now just recently hearing about it. I’m just feeling worried and wondering whether or not if I should do anything or not.
It literally is. The main maintainer didn’t want to learn Rust.
Even if that were true - does it matter?
Java is a perfectly valid choice for something like this.
Yes, Rust is “faster”, uses less memory, etc…
Java is fast enough, though. It offers a fantastic ecosystem and, seeing as these projects are ran by volunteers who do this in their free time, there’s a lot more people willing to chip in some work.
Rust’s speed is a cherry on top. The main reason to use it is its language design / correctness guarantees.
I’ve been programming for several decades and understand nuance and subjectivity vs objectivity when it comes to this, and strongly believe Rust is just objectively much better than Java as a language.
One example is that Rust doesn’t have null while Java does. The creator of null gave an excellent talk called The Billion Dollar Mistake about why null was such a bad idea, and said languages shouldn’t not have used it. Instead, the alternative he gives is what Rust does.
Things like this are actually hugely important.
Also, Rust was “most loved” language in the StackOverflow developer survey for eight years in a row for a reason.
https://survey.stackoverflow.co/2023/#section-admired-and-desired-programming-scripting-and-markup-languages
Other than Sublinks, I have never seen anyone post about how they really want to work with Java.
I have seen people wanting to do Java, and while I personally prefer rust, I do see why.
Outside of the entire Sublinks discussion, it’s important to note that Java is not just Java anymore either. Kotlin offers many of the same advantages syntax-wise that Rust does (including the lack of null), and has access to Java’s excellent ecosystem.
Ultimately, it is up to people to decide what they want to use. Regarding of your opinions on Java or Rust, it is a valid choice either way for this type of software. It’s a personal choice.
Yes because it fragments development of an already not well supported platform
How? The sublinks devs started the project just because they didn’t want to work on Lemmy for whatever reason. If they did, they would have worked on Lemmy. It’s either Lemmy AND Sublinks, or Just Lemmy with the same developers.
Having multiple implementations is a good thing, regardless of what language they use. They all implement the same protocol, should be (mostly) compatible, and can learn from (and compete with) each other.
Look at other OSS. There’s so many Linux distributions, Why doesn’t everyone just work on a single one?
Because everyone has a slightly different view on things. This makes the OSS community stronger.
So rather than the relatively simple task of learning rust (honestly not that tough for any half decent engineer, a couple of weekend toy projects had me more or less up to speed with it) they’re going to rebuild and track lemmy API changes—a technically endless task?
And I’ve just seen it’s Spring Boot too, which I’m fairly sure most of the industry is trying to move away from.
Shame the engineers want to spend all that effort that would be better spent improving lemmy rather than fracturing development resources between the two projects.
I’ve now gone from ambivalent towards this to actively hoping it fails.Edit: see the above comment’s blog post for more context that changed my mind
That would be news to me, someone in the industry, who works with Spring Boot.
Got anything to back that up?
They don’t because it’s not true.
There’s a few things moving to quarkus, but a lot of that is being pushed by Redhat (whose own software was not even spring boot but JEE)
Unfortunately given I’ve not been an active java engineer in over a decade, I’m getting this from conversations I’ve had and presentations I’ve seen from the Java engineers at my workplace and that I’ve previously worked with. I’m genuinely happy to be corrected though, I’ve definitely not got a horse in the Java framework race, at any rate.
Perhaps I’m/they’re mistaken, but I’ve got the impression from them that everything is heading towards Micronaut or Quarkus (and perhaps others that people I work with aren’t looking at) if you’re sticking with Java, and starting something new in SB would be against that direction of travel. Might be worth pointing out that a few of the Java devs seem to be doing more in kotlin as well, so perhaps it might be more to do with that and I’ve got the wrong end of the stick.