The fediverse is working. I am now following (using Mastodon) a “Learning Rust” community on Lemmy [1], who I found through them commenting on my peertube video [2] using Lemmy.
[1] @learningrustandlemmy [2] https://diode.zone/w/wJJJ7DRh3fCvHq6KuZY3t9
Hmm, I’m not sure what the end goal is. More devs would be the ideal I suppose. More people who can respond to questions is good too (I posted a while ago, asking why Lemmy sent an Undo of a Dislike as an Undo of a Like, and people gave their opinions, but it ended up being me who eventually answered the question).
I can’t imagine myself ever submitting a PR - aside from my rubbish programming abilities, the GitHub politics of many open-source projects is often the biggest hurdle (taking ages to craft a PR right, for it to be dismissed by a lead dev with an airy “I’m not sure we need this …” or “Oh, I’ve solved that problem - and so much more - on my private branch … [that’ll never see the light of day]”).
Also, whilst I’ve seen the suggestion that the front-end is being re-done in Rust, for now it’s in NodeJS, and for me it’s the UI that needs the most work (erroring, rather than waiting for unknown remote Communities to resolve, stops so many of them from ever taking off). Other UIs are available of course (who handle stuff like this better) but the implosion of Tesseract suggests that anything that isn’t the official one will ever get any back-end support - see https://lemmy.world/post/9014308 for evidence of some GitHub drama. Same is true of mobile apps too - Jerboa is arguably the worst, but it’s the only one that’ll ever be official - and that’s a whole different bunch of technologies.
Sorry for such a long reply. I just meant that even if a bunch of us learn Rust from this Community, it won’t necessarily lead to a better Lemmy, 'cos knowing Rust is only a small piece of the puzzle.
Sure, I’m also far from being likely to submit PRs, but the potential is there.
About Lemmy UIs , I’m now using Alexandrite - for a better layout of columns etc, easily setup on a local docker.
I’d be surprised if Rust makes sense for UI, but we’ll see what they come up with.
It is convenient to use the same language back and front. For my interactive climate model I use scala.js and am happy with that.
So here to learn what rust can do that scala can’t (if anything, beyond not needing GC)?
Me too. So far for Lemmy, I’ve done a ‘trending communities’ bot, an ActivityPub-based AutoMod, and a virtual Lemmy Community that posts stuff from Mastodon. An embarrassingly huge proportion of it is written in Bash - so I’m only just now learning that all variables aren’t supposed to be global.
My personal thinking was that while there’ll naturally be large variation in what people will get out of this community and what, if anything, they’ll be able to contribute back to the lemmy project … having the lemmy code base, the fediverse and ActivityPub as projects with generally shared interest and awareness as well as the actual core devs more or less around … all made sense as a sort of umbrella motivation for applying rust. That the lemmy core devs seem to be rust fans too means that they’d appreciate this place to some extent too.
Of course there’s no need for anyone to feel compelled to contribute back to lemmy. I’d personally be happy if I or someone else from here got to that point. But the overriding goal, IMO, is to learn together for sure.
@benjhm@sopuli.xyz