Well, for one thing federated message boards are incredibly niche to start with, and the pool of people willing to work on one for free in their spare time is bound to be tiny aside from language concerns. I know we all want the fediverse to be the hot thing that everyone uses, but that ain’t reality.

I’m not exactly seeing a massive contributor pool for sublinks here either.

At the scale of having a handful of contributors, it’s more likely random variance than due to the language you’ve chosen. The sample size is simply too small.

I can speak for myself - I know Rust very well but I simply don’t have the time to contribute to Lemmy’s code (I’m also spending some time already being an admin for Feddit.dk and I feel that is all I can muster).

Getting contributors to open source projects is never easy, regardless of programming language.

But I mean… there is no problem with competition right. Maybe it’ll turn out that sublinks will have more development with more contributors. But it has yet to be shown, there are also only 1 or 2 developers working on sublinks at the moment, if you check the github contributor stats.

Because people only contribute to projects they care about, can get clout from, or use and want to fix something that’s bugging them. Lemmy is just too niche right now.

If in five years there’s still just the two devs then you may gloat and tell me I was wrong and I will accept the shame

Yep. The job market isn’t as strong for rust, which is what that chart is showing you. Corporate acceptance != popularity.

Rust is #6 on the Stack Overflow developer survey in popularity. https://survey.stackoverflow.co/2023

Again, I don’t know why the community is insisting on making this a dick measuring contest for languages. People love rust. People love Java. I know people who still love Perl. I know one guy who really seems to look fondly on his Fortran days. they’re all fine.

Just be happy that someone is excited enough to write some code to make the fediverse a little more diverse and maybe cool.

any software is better with more reliability. Static analysis becomes more and more important as the code base grows.

You’re saying static analysis and reliability like they’re things Rust objectively has that Java doesn’t.

The only things Rust has at a fundamental level are a borrow checker and value types.

Value types can be nice for performance in certain situations (which aren’t nearly as important for a web server as fibers/coroutines). The borrow checker is nice for threading (which isn’t an issue in a restful web server design as previously stated). That’s about it.

(Safe) Rust and Java are both memory safe. I don’t think any is better than the other in this aspect.

It’s not possible to write (memory) unsafe Java code. All Java code is memory safe. Most rust code is memory safe.

Of course that’s not entirely true because of the possibility for bugs in the Rust compiler or the JVM.

Java and Rust both can call out to C libraries as well which of course… You get what you get.

Python for instance. At least Java has static typing

Python can have static typing these days as well. It’s just optional and controlled by the project.

I do think the developer experience with Rust is better in general though, so even if Rust was used elsewhere, it would still be liked more than Java, I would guess.

But we won’t know who’s right for another 10 years maybe :P

You can write functions… A static function is not particularly different from a free function written in a namespace. You can even use a static import to allow yourself to call it without qualification.

I’m referring to functional programming concepts like anonymous functions and functions as parameters. Java finally added support for this with Lambda expression in Java 8, but because it took them so long, most libraries and frameworks that wanted to support backwards compatibility didn’t use them and still forced everything into classes and objects, meaning that most Java code bases you find are purely object oriented.

______ProviderBuilderProvider

idea what this is in reference to. I have a feeling your issue is more with the frameworks you’ve worked with than Java itself.

It’s in reference to the fact that unlike basically every other modern programming language, Java doesn’t let you do stuff like have default parameters for functions, instead forcing you to overload them:

In Javascript / C# you just have:

function DoSomething(int  howManyTimes = 10){
    //something
}

In Java you have:

function DoSomething() {
    int howManyTimes = 10;
    //something
}
function DoSomething(int howManyTimes) {
    //something
}

Which then leads you to recommendations of using the Builder Pattern, and now you’ve got the function / class you care about rewritten three times, plus a whole a builder class and a bunch of building specific functions, all of which are basically just a whole bunch of unnecessary verbose bullshit to approximate default parameters that are expressed more clearly with 2 additional characters in other languages.