It could be the devs just like programming in Rust. It's a nice language lol
this post was submitted on 15 Jun 2023
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I'm not convinced using rust is all that useful for web development. There are already plenty of other mature well optimized solutions for backend web development that includes a lot of security, qol features ootb like mature orm's with optimized database access which regardless of how fast your code is can bottleneck your site much faster if you don't have smart database access.
Yeah, theoretically rust can be faster than ruby/python/node, but it's harder to optimize it enough to get to that point and you will have a much harder time finding devs to work on such a project because the amount of backend devs that have enough rust experience is so small, they're like on the opposite sides of the ven diagram of languages for web developers.
On top of all that, languages which are heavily used for web development often get low level optimizations baked into the frameworks/languages so you can get pretty amazing performance uplifts over time to bring it to the level of lower level languages.
I think the devs openly stated they aren't backend bods and asked for help optimising the database as a priority. There's a bit of work going on on github to sort that out I think. Anyone reading this who can optimise postgresql or contribute to a database agnostic retool should probably speak to the devs as I imagine you'd be welcome.
I wish I could help so much but I doubt they're going to retool into .net haha.
Which is fine. If they wanted to learn Rust and wrote inefficient code, good for them. I appreciate their efforts. Rust can certainly be beaten into shape and perform well enough in the end.
Rust itself or the way the Rust logic is implemented is not the bottleneck. Like most decent web applications the bottleneck is the database and how the decentralized protocols themselves are reconciled there.
Scaling massive amounts of records like Lemmy has been forced to is almost always IO bound at the database level even when a web service is centralized; this is much more difficult in federated architectures. This is why “NoSQL” databases have increased in popularity, but they are also not a magic bullet as there are major ACID trade offs one needs to consider.
The real benefit as I see it for using rust for backends is memory safety.
All the major languages for web backends are memory safe. Java, C#, etc
These are garbage collected languages and come with the overhead of such a process. Rust has no GC process and instead relies on reference counters to statically track live memory.
"GC overhead" only matter for extreme realtime applications, like emulators, games, drivers, simulators, etc. a 10msec (or even a 100msec) pause in a request processing isn't gonna even be noticed when your network, database and disk IO are literally orders of magnitude higher. Use Rust for web services if you like the language, comfortable with it, etc. Don't use it because you think it'll give you "more performance" or "reduce GC overhead".
Java, C#, Python, Node, or even PHP as languages will never be your web backend bottleneck. Large scale web services performance tuning is entirely architectural. What caches you keep, how you organize your data, how many network operation does 1 user interaction translate to, stateful vs stateless components etc.