I know that Lemmy is open source and it can only get better from here on out, but I do wonder if any experts can weigh in whether the foundation is well written? Or are we building on top of 4 years worth of tech debt?
I know that Lemmy is open source and it can only get better from here on out, but I do wonder if any experts can weigh in whether the foundation is well written? Or are we building on top of 4 years worth of tech debt?
There are no good code bases, only less bad ones.
The only valid measurement of code quality: WTFs/minute
Yup, code is bad, more code is worse. And unparseable specialist code is a technical debt.
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
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.
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.
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