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Is Lemmy's code base "good"?
(lemm.ee)
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this post was submitted on 03 Jul 2023
210 points (97.7% liked)
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There are no good code bases, only less bad ones.
The only valid measurement of code quality: WTFs/minute
Is Lemmy less bad or more bad than a typical open source project?
From some comments I've read, it's at least in better shape than kbin? A few people expressed interest in helping with that project and then went running for the hills after reading through the code.
It’s probably not the only reason, but Rust is a much more attractive language/platform for devs to work with than PHP. (Source: https://survey.stackoverflow.co/2023/#section-admired-and-desired-programming-scripting-and-markup-languages)
It’s also more scalable, because it’s a compiled multi-threaded technology, while PHP is interpreted and mono-threaded.
Mother. Of. God. Did they really write Kbin in PHP?
I may be talking shit because I'm not a PHP coder, but the times I've seen it, it was a nightmare.
Which... makes sense. The creator of doesn't like coding.
So PHP it born out of a dislike of coding. In turn the documentation is all over the place and inconsistent.
Makes sense. And JavaScript is born out of a dislike of coders🤣
To be fair, PHP has slowly been getting it's shit together since PHP 7, and 8 seems to be in a reasonably great shape compared to the horrors of 5.6
It has become really solid over time.
But it will always be a mono-threaded and interpreted technology, and therefore never a good choice for a high-scale solution like a Fediverse application.
There are good PHP codes out there as well...
PHP is really old isn't it? I remember using phpBB forums some twenty years ago. They worked really well, but that's going pretty far back.
It is, but it aged pretty well.
Devs wanted to store state in objects, so it became object-oriented. It also gained a really solid full-fledged web framework with a strong community, with Symfony; and some strong micro-frameworks like Laravel.
But it will always be interpreted and mono-threaded, and therefore never a good choice for high-scale solutions. Facebook has to invent a brand new language (Hack) and runtime (HHVM) that was close enough to PHP so they could spend millions spending their PHP codebase to it, in order to make it compiled and multi-threaded, and make it scale.
PHP is an interpreted language which is inherently slow compared to a compiled language, such as Rust which is very fast. Modern PHP isn’t so bad kinda but I’m guessing a guy who hates programming and decided to start a new PHP project in 2023 isn’t really optimizing anything. Also, you’ll never get anyone you help you write PHP because gross. It’s a dead language with a small community of masochists and maintainers of legacy projects.
It would be like if you saw someone building a fighter jet and thought “hey, I can do better!” and then started getting your paper mache out to start playing air plane designer.
That’s PHP for ya
I read from one admin that a Lemmy instance is a lot easier to set up and maintain than a kbin instance. It's initially more complicated to set up and updates are just a super headache to deal with. That sounds like a showstopper. I mean kbin is not going to get too far if it's that difficult to run and maintain an instance, no matter how good or bad the code.
From a user perspective kbin has a really nice looking interface, though Lemmy has more features. I'd like to see kbin do well. It's younger than Lemmy so it's going to be behind, but hopefully the overhead in running an instance can be resolved.
The best code base is the repo I just created and haven't committed anything to.
Just clone this one. Guaranteed the best repo ever! https://github.com/kelseyhightower/nocode
Wait, so the answer is, “it depends?” 🌎👨🚀🔫👨🚀
No the answer is that it is written in a modern language, is in its infancy and needs a lot of work to be really great, but it's based on a certified protocol ActivityPub, that Mastodon and other "fediverse" systems use. It's going to be really great, eventually.
"It depends" is a reference to an inside joke between developers. I agree with you that it could be really great, whether or not a code base is "good" or "bad" is just a complicated and highly subjective question to answer
thanks - yes, I suspected it was. Lemmy is what it is - and agree the question is difficult to answer concisely. Understanding that interpretation of "good" vs "bad" codebases is subjective, there are plenty of production systems that are unambiguously "not good". The great thing about lemmy isn't the UI, it's the threading and reddit-like communities built on the ActivityPub foundation. It's the right foundation.
Yup, code is bad, more code is worse. And unparseable specialist code is a technical debt.
Hey, my code base is fantastic if you ignore all the stuff I had to inherit, did in a time crunch, or didn't understand what I was doing!