Lemmy is an open-source, federated link aggregator and discussion platform similar to Reddit, Lobste.rs, or Hacker News. The software stack used in Lemmy includes Rust with Actix and Diesel for the backend, and TypeScript with Inferno for the frontend.
The developers chose Rust for its performance, safety, and concurrency features, which help in building a reliable and efficient backend. Actix is a popular Rust web framework that provides a lightweight and fast foundation for the server-side application. Diesel is a Rust ORM (Object-Relational Mapping) and query builder that simplifies database interactions. On the frontend, TypeScript offers better type safety and tooling compared to plain JavaScript, while Inferno is a fast and lightweight React-like library for building user interfaces. These technologies were chosen to create a performant, reliable, and easily deployable platform.
I read someone saying that the lack of contributors was due to the software stack being unconventional and takes people a while to get used to it. So I was curious to know what other people would have used.
The issue of attracting contributors is a funny one right now. We happen to be living in a time of plentiful new and interesting languages. Rust, D, Vale, and Elixir, for example, have all caught my attention by bringing things to the table that older, better-established languages don’t do as well. In order to benefit from them, and potentially help shape them into tools that benefit us even more, we have to use them. This is how we build a better future for ourselves, and for our field. IMHO, this is more important than maximizing the number potential contributors on every project. As a fairly new project, Lemmy is in a good position to make this trade-off.
(Also, having fewer contributors generally makes a project easier to manage, so the downside is not necessarily all down.)
I’m mainly glad they chose something with decent memory safety. This is important to me in systems that face the network or process external data.
Rust probably wouldn’t have been my first choice, because my early impression is that it seems ugly and awkward, so I don’t think I would enjoy using it. That doesn’t make it an objectively bad tool for the job.
On the front end, I just wish it was less reliant on JavaScript, such that basic functionality worked when scripts are disabled in the browser. Outside of that, TypeScript seems like a fine choice.