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Every language has its niche (lemmy.world)

submitted 8 months ago by nifty@lemmy.world to c/programmer_humor@programming.dev

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[-] otl@hachyderm.io 97 points 8 months ago

Mastodon is written in Ruby. Nowhere near as big as Facebook or the ML field, but hey, it's important to a couple of us at least :)

@programming @nifty

[-] pkill@programming.dev 39 points 8 months ago

and therefore scales terribly ;;

[-] arc@lemm.ee 11 points 8 months ago* (last edited 8 months ago)

It probably wasn't a big deal when it was a niche project until Twitter imploded. Then all the public instances got overloaded with new users and the limits became obvious.

A better design is Lemmy which is written in Rust so it has far more scalability. It's compiled and because it's tokio / actix based, it can also do a lot more stuff asynchronously so it's not spawning thousands of threads to cope with concurrent requests.

[-] otl@hachyderm.io 4 points 8 months ago

@pkill Yeah seems that way, judging by their scaling up documentation: https://docs.joinmastodon.org/admin/scaling/

Although hey, it all depends on a whole bunch of stuff written in super optimised (and kinda scary) C !

@programmer_humor

[-] towerful@programming.dev 3 points 8 months ago

Those docs look pretty easy to scale mastodon. What am i missing?

[-] otl@hachyderm.io 5 points 8 months ago

@towerful I mainly program in Go, so when I see all that extra software I notice how much easier it is when I get to just rely on the Go runtime. It does a lot of the heavy lifting done here, but the resulting code is not as clean. Actually just today I read through Mastodon’s code to track down a bug in my in-progress ActivityPub service (in Go) and found the Ruby really easy to navigate!

@programmer_humor