Seems like an interesting effort. A developer is building an alternative Java-based backend to Lemmy’s Rust-based one, with the goal of building in a handful of different features. The dev is looking at using this compatibility to migrate their instance over to the new platform, while allowing the community to use their apps of choice.
Too bad it’s java
Browsing the code makes me angry at how bloated Java projects are:
package com.sublinks.sublinksapi.community.repositories; import com.sublinks.sublinksapi.community.dto.Community; import com.sublinks.sublinksapi.community.models.CommunitySearchCriteria; import com.sublinks.sublinksapi.post.dto.Post; import com.sublinks.sublinksapi.post.models.PostSearchCriteria; import org.springframework.data.domain.Page; import org.springframework.data.domain.Pageable; import org.springframework.data.jpa.repository.JpaRepository; import org.springframework.data.jpa.repository.Query; import org.springframework.data.repository.query.Param; import java.util.List; public interface CommunitySearchRepository { List<Community> allCommunitiesBySearchCriteria(CommunitySearchCriteria communitySearchCriteria); }Every file is 8 directories deep, has 20 imports, and one SQL statement embedded in a string literal. 😭
Yup. Welcome to the world of Java where such things are not only silly but encouraged.
And what’s bad about that? As in, how is the verbosity a negative thing exactly? More so because virtually any tool can be configured to default-collapse these things if for your specific workflow you don’t require the information.
At the same time, since everything is verbose, you can get very explicit information if you need it.
Here’s an example:
IMO that’s a lot of code (and a whole dedicated file) just to (magically) hook a global event and increase the subscriber count when a link object is added.
The worst part is that it’s all copy/pasted into a neighbouring file which does the reverse:
It’s not the end of the world or anything, I just think good code should surprise you with its simplicity. This surprises me with its complexity.
I find that Java is overly Verbose, but it’s much better than the alternative of underly verbose.
Java really follows the single class for single functionality principle, so in theory it makes sense to have these located in different classes. It should probably be abstracted to a shared method, but it shouldn’t be in the same file.
At least to me this looks like simplicity, but I’ve been writing Java in some capacity since 2012.
It’s not just the visible complexity in this one file. The point of it is to keep a subscriber count in sync, but you have that code I referenced above, plus:
LinkPersonCommunityCreatedEventLinkPersonCommunityDeletedEventLinkPersonCommunityCreatedPublisherLinkPersonCommunityDeletedPublisherAnd then there are things like
LinkPersonCommunityUpdated[Event/Publisher]which don’t even seem to be used.This is all boilerplate IMO.
And all of that only (currently) serves keeping that subscriber count up to date.
And then there’s the hidden complexity of how things get wired up with spring.
And after all that it’s still fragile because that event is not tied to object creation:
@Transactional public void addLink(Person person, Community community, LinkPersonCommunityType type) { final LinkPersonCommunity newLink = LinkPersonCommunity.builder().community(community) .person(person).linkType(type).build(); person.getLinkPersonCommunity().add(newLink); community.getLinkPersonCommunity().add(newLink); linkPersonCommunityRepository.save(newLink); linkPersonCommunityCreatedPublisher.publish(newLink); }And there’s some code here:
final Set<LinkPersonCommunity> linkPersonCommunities = new LinkedHashSet<>(); linkPersonCommunities.add(LinkPersonCommunity.builder().community(community).person(person) .linkType(LinkPersonCommunityType.owner).build()); linkPersonCommunities.add(LinkPersonCommunity.builder().community(community).person(person) .linkType(LinkPersonCommunityType.follower).build()); communityService.createCommunity(community); linkPersonCommunityRepository.saveAllAndFlush(linkPersonCommunities);that is able to bypass the community link service and create links in the repository directly, which would presumably not trigger than event.
Maybe there’s a good reason for that, but it sure looks fragile to me.
Yeah but that’s more on the coder. Like you indirectly say, they could just as well have had a single listener for community update events, since they all share the data structure for such events (I would assume, haven’t looked around too much).
And to me as a professional java coder, I will say it’s just not complex. The scaffolding you mentally discard after a week of working with Java unless you’re looking for something related to do the scaffolding - and then it’s cool that it’s all explicitly there, this has helped me countless times in my career and is one of the big strengths of such verbose languages - and beyond that and some design choices I would not have made that way related to naming and organization, there’s not much code there to begin with. In modern Java you might just do this in a lambda supplied in the place where you hook the events, anyways.
how is the verbosity a negative thing exactly
Fun fact, studies have found that the number of bugs in a program is proportional to the number of lines of codes, across languages. More lines of codes, more bugs, even for the same math and edge cases. So a more verbose language tends to have more bugs.
Interesting, but did this include web code and code only one person really ever works on?
Because on the pure backend level, I have observed the reverse over my career. The shorter, the “smarter”, the “cooler” the code, the more buggy it is. Not based on the code itself, but based on the developer inevitably leaving the company at some point. Meaning that what matters all of is a sudden is how verbose, how documented and how explicit the code is, because the bugs come from someone else messing with it as they get to take it over. It’s a legacy problem in a lot of ways.
Hence me saying that if solo projects are included, they probably tilt this massively as they’ll never really run into this problem. Like say, you just scan github or something. Of course most projects in there are solo, of course the more lines the more room for bugs.
But in an environment where you’re not solo coding, the issue is not getting the code to run and having it have no programmed bugs, but to be able to have someone else understand what you did and wanted to do in a meaningful amount of time, especially as they have to mutate your code over years and decades. Or maybe it’s just that the bugs no longer are what “matters”, as fixing code bugs is cheap compared to the endless hours wasted from “clever” code being unmaintainable. 🤷I have a similar experience, in that anytime I heard someone hating on the verbosity of Java it was never the good devs the ones who can write a code that’s readable a few months later.
Its still better than any python project lol
Really? I find python imports to work very similar to cpp in practice.
But you really dont see what the function wants or requires or returns ( except with typehints, but they dont work most of the time and then its not enforced in any way )
There’s nothing wrong with java
There is nothing inherently wrong with Java I would speculate, but it can be a royal pain in the ass to manage if you just need one application to work.
I know the basics of the language, but from what I have seen managing it, I don’t like it. Just from being in security, I constantly hit barriers with devs because of versioning issues. There is always some ancient app running on a version of Java that can’t be updated, for whatever reason. Version management is always a pain, but with Java? Goddamn.
I admit ignorance about the details of Java and how awesome it is for job security. There is no way in hell I could even debate anyone who has watched a single video on YouTube about Java. However, from what I have seen, it either works great or it fails explosively with billions of randomly allocated threads attempting to suck memory from every other server within 50 miles.
If it’s awesome to code with, cool. I am just a little salty from my experiences, as you can tell.
Legacy Java software is a massive pain in the ass. No arguments there. I’ve been migrating an app from Java 11->17 for the last 2 months and it’s a versioning mess. So many libraries deprecated and removed that don’t have easy replacements.
It’s great because things don’t break when they’re running, but the problem is upgrading.
Version management does seem to have become better with the last couple versions
(Confirmation bias, ENGAGE!)
We have a few of those projects coming up as well. Thankfully, I just get to poke at the apps to make sure the issues are resolved.
But yeah, one of my examples of rogue threads is a coding issue, not inherently a language issue. Even log4j issues can’t be completely blamed on Java “The Language”.
Well, it wears down your keyboard.
Oh yes there is
Who cares? If it works, it works.
The biggest strength of Java is that many programmers has years or even decades of experience in it.
I care, as someone who self hosts and have been doing so for 22 years. Java has always been the most annoying thing to maintain as a holster, especially on low resourced machines, like my raspi
Java is for enterprise level software that’s robust not for self hosting on a pi
You self host lemmy.world?
No, why does that matter?
Also you don’t have to worry about memory management
You don’t with Rust either.
Lol how about one written in NodeJS? 😆
Brainfuck would be my choice if we are making things harder for ourselves.
I bet there are forks already. NodeJS is quite popular really.
I love Java.
As someone who used to be a Java programmer, I can’t make any sense of that statement.
Java is the first language I learned. I love how structured it is and how it forces you to work within the paradigm. I might never use it again, but it shaped how I think of programming.
That’s why I like Java too. The fact that it’s so strict means I have to think about projects in a certain way and can’t just wing my way through it like Python.
Right. And then you’ll write better code when you do use Python or JavaScript or whatever.
As someone who mostly uses C++ and C# Java is much easier for most projects
I have a hard time believing that rewriting the backend from scratch would be faster than getting PRs approved on the main project.
Forks like this with one guy who “knows best” usually die a slow quiet death as they get left behind by the main project.
Depends on amount of technical debt really. Sometimes rewrite is the only way. But in general fixing things can be done. It’s just matter of time, focus and effort.
What missing features are so important that you decide to recreate the entire backend of Lemmy because you think the devs aren’t fast enough?
Java instead of Rust is going to be a big thing for a lot of people who would like to contribute in their spare time. Yeah, Rust is cool, but every CS grad and their mother knows Java.
Back during the migration surge a few months ago, you commonly saw a LOT of comments from folks saying they would love to help eat away at the project’s backlog, but they just didn’t have the time or energy to learn Rust at the moment.
Any recent CS grad is obsessed with rust, trust me. It’s not hard to learn either with that background.
If I were to guess, it’s not recent grads making those posts. I got the sense those comments were coming from people who had been around for a while. Folks who are now senior enough to be trapped in draining meetings all day, and have to manage a family a night.
The work day and home life can get longer and more exhausting the further the older you get.
Yeah, Rust is cool, but every CS grad and their mother knows Java.
Sure, twenty-five years ago, when Sun was pushing their language hard into colleges everywhere.
Now? Sun Microsystems doesn’t even exist, and everybody hates the JVM in an ecosystem where VMWare, Docker, and Kubernetes do the whole “virtual machine” model much better.
Now? Sun Microsystems doesn’t even exist
That was a long, long, long time ago.
Java has continued to be very popular after Oracle purchased Sun Microsystems.
Can’t say I agree. It feels like an almost even 50/50 split between Java and C# when I look at job postings.
I think rust is a very pragmatic choice, lemmy is decentralized, the security benefits are a necessity when it comes to self hosters donating hardware
Java is also memory safe
After working in java for over a decade, I will never use another garbage-collected language if I can avoid it again. I still have nightmares about debugging memory build-ups and having to trace down where to do manual garbage collection. I remember my shop eventually just paid for 32 GB ram servers, and java filled those up too.
Rust doesn’t have these problems because its not a garbage collected language like java or go, and has an ownership-based memory model that’s easy to work with.
Is that still a problem in newer java versions? I have to admit I have only written simple things in java.
Garbage collection is by nature imperfect, its impossible for it to always be correct about when and what things to free up in memory. The best option is to not use a garbage collected language.
Wow. It’s amazing that anyone ever got anything to work in java. Must have never got used for anything
It seems to be more language focused than hard to PR against the main repo.
Java is much more widely known than Rust, which means a much larger pool of developers. I never contributed to the original Lemmy server because I couldn’t wrap my head around a full production scale rust project. I’ll very likely contribute to this because I work with production Java code daily. Im sure I’m not the only other dev who has run into this.
Also maybe there’s just too many disagreements with the Lemmy owners, who are a bit extreme for a lot of people.
Lemmy doesn’t have to have missing features for someone to want to write their own implementation. And in a decentralized system you want multiple implementations to exist. This is a good thing
Trust and Safety tooling, apparently.
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Made me think of this.
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What’s MApalmtreebicepAB
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I prefer DreamBerd which solves that endless debate by indexing from
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Oh, you mean, like Taiwan?
for a moment I thought you were talking about 🤣-lang
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MApalmarmAB?
MATLAB
Lmao at people not being able to read that.
Having a frontend rewrite seemed more critical than trying reimplementing the backend in a different language.
Remember, Lemmy had 4 years of development to iron out bugs, and this is essentially promising to make something in months that has a fully compatible backend to support all the third party apps, while adding features on top of what Lemmy has, and with a better front end with better mod tools to boot, with a complete rewrite of everything.
The scope of this project has planned for is already unviable. Suppose that Sublinks does reach feature parity to the current version of Lemmy, congratulations, the backend or mod tools is not something a regular user is going to notice or care about at all, all they will know is that suddenly, there are weird bugs that wasn’t there before, and that causes frustration.
And this project is going to get more developer traction because… Java?
I’d like to be proven wrong, but I’m very sceptical about the success of Sublinks, because it look like a project that was started out of tech arrogance to prove a point than out of a real need, I don’t work in tech, but the general trajectory of these kind of projects is that “enthusiasm from frustration” can only take you so far before the annoyance of dealing with mundane problems piles up, and the project fizzles out and ends with a whimper.
I have higher hopes. Java is three times more developers than Rust (https://www.statista.com/statistics/793628/worldwide-developer-survey-most-used-languages/), and you can see in this thread a number of people saying they could contribute as they know Java and not Rust.
Let’s hope for the best.
Java is a corporate language that most devs hate. Rust (Lemmy) is more popular as a hobby language that devs enjoy hacking in for fun.
Hm, Java is hated by devs, but still 2nd language on GitHub with 11,7% of the total code hosted, while Rust is number 13 with 1,8%?
Stockholm syndrome.
And even more, the Lemmy codebase doesn’t really have any important developers besides the two main devs: https://github.com/LemmyNet/lemmy/graphs/contributors.
Even looking at the contributions to something like Mbin, which has been around for much shorter, you already see 6 people with more than 50 commits, while Lemmy has one
We have 13 contributors with Sublinks so far. I expect more will come after the announcement.
Java devs like you need to step away from the PC and stop assaulting the world with a terrible language. You should be ashamed of yourselves for inflicting decades of misery on the world.
Java will go the way of COBOL. The future is Nim.
You’re delusional if you believe people care about Nim. It has been around for 16 years and is still nothing in comparison to Java. Java won’t go anywhere and is here to stay.
I don’t like Java either, but there’s no need to insult the developers for using a language they like.
Irrelevant
Typical Java dev attitude.
Thanks but I’m a network engineer, I’m just saying your argument is pointless, the majority of devs support a certain language. How they or you feel about it doesn’t matter one bit.
That’s bullshit, frankly
Java is a corporate language that most devs hate
Citation required, because strangely enough people whom I hear about complaining about Java never seem to be the good developers but the ones I wouldn’t hire
I’m pretty sure Nutomic was a Java dev before starting work on Lemmy and learning Rust from scratch. That by itself should already speak volumes.
One-Up projects like this rarely ever turn out well, that’s from my own experiences. Even though this isn’t a popular view, I still think I’m right on this one, we can circle back in say, 6 months, to see if my predictions are right.
I’m pretty sure Nutomic was a Java dev before starting work on Lemmy and learning Rust from scratch.
That is true, I used to be an Android developer and then learned Rust by writing code for Lemmy. Are you by any chance my new stalker?
And if we’re comparing the languages, the fact alone that there are no Nullpointerexceptions makes Rust infinitely better than Java for me. I also agree that this sort of copycat project will soon be forgotten. For example have you ever heard of Rustodon?
Are you by any chance my new stalker?
No, it was on that AMA you guys did months ago, and I remember things about people.
Very impressive! The only thing I can remember well are places.
I also was a professional java dev, and also had to use spring boot in most corporate environments.
I don’t wanna knock anyone’s re-write, because I know how difficult it is to dissuade someone when they’re excited about a project. But to me, starting a new project or doing a rewrite, is the best opportunity to learn a newer, better language. We taught ourself Rust by coding lemmy, and I recently learned Kotlin / jetpack compose because I wanted to learn android development. Learning new languages is not an issue for most programmers; we have to learn new frameworks and languages every year or so if we want to keep up.
This is potentially hundreds of hours of wasted time that could be spent on other things. Even if someone absolutely hates Rust and doesn’t want to contribute to the massive amount of open issues on Lemmy, there are still a lot of front-ends that could use more contributors.
There are some projects that start because of “tech arrogance” as you describe the current situation. MariaDB, Git, LibreOffice are some of the most famous ones, but I’m sure there are more.
But does it have blockchain AI integration?
I didn’t know Lemmy was written in Rust.
Lemmy is how I learned about Rust.
This actually makes me want to contribute to lemmy.
Based on all the other threads and cross posts it just seems like this software is being created because Jason Grim doesn’t like the lemmy devs or their politics. I guess that’s as good of a reason to fork as any. I’m happy with the way lemmy is and how its being created so I have been doing monthly donations to them for its development.
It’s not a fork though. It’s a complete rewrite in another programming language. That’s way more effort than a petty project.
The truth is, this might succeed based on developer reach. I love Rust, but I know it won’t have the reach (yet) that Java can, and more developers mean faster progress.
In the end, between this, Lemmy or another project which may be a fork of either, the success will be due to efforts of everyone involve at every stage. This wouldn’t exist without Lemmy, and Lemmy wouldn’t exist with ActivityPub.
I’m not sure I believe “faster” progress really means anything when two communists are creating a hobby software that isn’t really for business or necessarily targeting growth at all costs.
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I am not a communist. I cannot believe I had to write that.
Sorry, my question got removed. But it was a genuine question (curiosity.) I didn’t mean to disparage you.
a missed opportunity to name it Jemmy
I’m just here for the joke
EDIT: sentence structure
I like this, I will contribute to this, I think a lot of Java haters in this thread fail to realize just how massive Java is compared to everything else.
Rust might be the latest, hottest, bestest Java killer out there and it might be a completely superior language to Java, doesn’t matter, it’s dwarfed in terms of how many people actually use it for real projects, projects that should run for years and years. Even if Rust is the true Java killer, it’s gonna take a good few more years for it to kill java, measured in decades, there is just way too many projects and critical stuff out there that is running on Java, that means lots of jobs out there for java, still and still more.
This means there are a lot of senior Java programmers out there with lots of years of experience to contribute to this project.
Plus Lemmy itself having alternatives and choices is just a good thing.
Agreed. I mean COBOL is still a thing, and that’s a language that’s been dead for 30+ years.
I am not a fan of Java. However, I think that you are 100% correct. This is a potentially very useful stack to have available and I hope that the two projects track together well.
This project has potential for high velocity development that Lemmy will never be able to match, purely because of the languages. Rust is, factually, slower to develop in than Java, even for experienced devs. Add to that the greater population that is comfortable with Java, and you have a recipe for really pushing interesting things and innovating quickly. Possibly establishing a relationship somewhat like Debian Sid to Debian Stable. It could also be interesting to have some low-level, Rust modules that are shared between the two when Lemmy gets to 1.0 (API stability), if there is something that is more optimally implemented in Rust but that would introduce more coupling.
Thank you for your perspective
Languages won’t grow if you ditch them for other ones. There’s lots of reasons to use rust, outside of the size of the project
I think you will find that the biggest reason to use a language is to get paid for it and there Java is very well positioned
That’s the reason for for hire devs yeah, but if you are starting a new project ( especially a community one like lemmy where the profit motive is different) choosing your tech stack is a complex decision
Rust is as much of a Java killer as C++ is. You could say Rust is the C++ killer, but I really don’t see how Rust would be that comparable to Java, which operates at a higher level instead of memory and pointer management. IMO, Kotlin is the Java killer.
I’ve been hearing a lot of good things for a while. Lookin forward to it.
I’m hearing hype from the people making it… dunno why anyone else would have anything positive or negative to say yet
I guess my username won’t make sense anymore. But it sounds so good that it doesn’t need to make sense.
That’s okay, no one thinks my username makes sense when it absolutely does.
Idk why that reminded me of a very old Minecraft release where there was a bug where squids can actually fly.
Idk if I misremembered that or if it was an actually real thing.
I can’t find the fucking porn on Lemmy, so maybe this is a good thing.
Lemmynsfw
lemm.ee doesn’t block it, so it’s not a problem with your instance. You don’t have to ask how I know
So while there’s plenty of talk in here (even from the core lemmy devs) about how much it makes sense and how much value there is in starting a new project with a different tech stack that includes Java, compared to simply contributing back to the current project that has momentum … and while that’s an interesting and important conversation …
Realistically, developers will make what they want to with what they want to (to a fault IMO, especially within the broader mission of the fediverse, but that’s besides the point). This project will happen, people will contribute and it may succeed.
So, to focus on the positives and what can be made good about this …
It’s great that there’s some sort of settling on a standard here and trying to be a “drop in replacement”. Continued commitments to consistency and interoperability would be awesome. While collaboration may be naturally limited, there’d still definitely be scope for it …
- ideas and designs, obviously
- Database management and optimisation, which is likely a big one.
- On that … AFAICT, SL is using MySQL? Can’t help but wonder (without knowing the technical justifications here) whether it would make much more sense to stick with the same DB unless there’s a good reason for divergence.
- Front ends and the API, another big one but one where the two projects could conceivably work together.
I’m likely being very naive here, but I can see both projects coming under a single umbrella or compact which provide different backends and maybe DB setups or schemas but otherwise share a good amount in design and mission.
However unlikely that is … trying not to fragment the fediverse too much would be awesome and its pleasant to see some dedication here to that end.
whether it would make much more sense to stick with the same DB unless there’s a good reason for divergence.
SL Dev said they reengineered the database schema and didn’t want to use the Lemmy one. Based on the summer performance issues, I guess it makes sense.
However unlikely that is … trying not to fragment the fediverse too much would be awesome and its pleasant to see some dedication here to that end.
At the end of the day, it’s still Activitypub. The compatibility between Lemmy and Kbin works pretty well, most of the issues we had were federation related, and those existed within Lemmy itself.
Well there’s still the question of using MySQL (?) rather than postgresql, where all manner of expertise about the DB can be useful to share. Not sure what kbin uses, but pgsql is pretty common around the fediverse.
And yea, it is all ActivityPub. I’m just not as faithful in that as others tend to be. It seems to be a fuzzy system that allows idiosyncrasies to creep in. Mastodon and Lemmy don’t get along too well and so sometimes AP just isn’t enough (I’ve just been trying to help someone whose masto instance seems not able to post to lemmy). At this moment, getting along is valuable for the platforms, for the fediverse and for us users.
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