this post was submitted on 14 Jun 2024
80 points (98.8% liked)
Fediverse
27910 readers
5 users here now
A community to talk about the Fediverse and all it's related services using ActivityPub (Mastodon, Lemmy, KBin, etc).
If you wanted to get help with moderating your own community then head over to [email protected]!
Rules
- Posts must be on topic.
- Be respectful of others.
- Cite the sources used for graphs and other statistics.
- Follow the general Lemmy.world rules.
Learn more at these websites: Join The Fediverse Wiki, Fediverse.info, Wikipedia Page, The Federation Info (Stats), FediDB (Stats), Sub Rehab (Reddit Migration), Search Lemmy
founded 1 year ago
MODERATORS
you are viewing a single comment's thread
view the rest of the comments
view the rest of the comments
Rust is a niche language
It's like starting a book club in Esperanto compared to English. Sure, Esperanto is supposedly a better language, but very few people know about it
Rust is not a niche language. It’s a strict and strongly opinionated language by design. People with background in strongly typed languages, who additionally use opinionated linters and formatters have an easier time adjusting. JavaScript “devs” (note: distinct from “software engineers”) probably pull their hair out over a lot of stuff in because in my experience, many js devs know enough about the language to work proficiently in a couple of frameworks, but haven’t really dug into the nuances of the language, and also have limited experience with strong typing.
So it's a nice language.
Very nice even :D
My main argument about Rust being a niche language is how few contributors there are to the Lemmy codebase.
Mbin (PHP) has more spread across its contributors:
But maybe Rust isn't that niche, but the Fediverse apps and projects are niche themselves.
The Lemmy frontend is written in Typescript which is a very popular language, yet it has even less contributors than the backend.
Lemmy is niche even within the fediverse, where microblogging still dominates and the threadiverse style apps are smaller. It's just not a very large space.
I guess Reddit and similar link aggregators are just much smaller than we all think they are.
Even reddit is still niche when it comes to social media and has always been. It's become a little more mainstream the last few years, but for most people social media still equals Facebook, Instagram, Twitter, Snapchat and such.