So Rust is capital H Hard to hire good developers. There just ain’t enough with experience in not only the language, but service management, the rest of the SDLC, SLAs, getting the best out of Diesel and knowing DBs, and the grizzled nature needed to be leading teams etc. There just isn’t enough of it in production to have built up this industry level that python, js, php, c#, and java have. Typescript is also pretty niche still, and thus has similar problems, though not to the same extent.

And I’ve noticed pretty much every backend dev would like Rust, every front Typescript. And fullstack will learn and run everything and anything anyway. And so this is a temporary problem. Early adoptors, like lemmy, will see more people contribute, more learn, more launch more stuff. And that starts with open source projects.

And thus: I’d make exactly the same decisions. Lemmy isn’t a bank, it’s more a start-up, it doesn’t pay well, it has to attract on other benefits. Attracting volunteers might be easier in desirable languages, will certainly be easier in ten years time say than Rails, Play, or Laravel might be. CV fluffing from OS contributions is a fantastic way to make yourself more marketable, and who doesn’t want TS/Rust on that CV?