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395

PieFed be like (infosec.pub)

submitted 18 hours ago by OpenStars@piefed.social to c/fedimemes@feddit.uk

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[–] asudox@lemmy.asudox.dev 2 points 13 hours ago* (last edited 13 hours ago) (1 children)

Once it approaches maturity, surely it could switch to e.g. moar reliability at the expense of agility?

Unfortunately, you can't just "switch" to more reliability. That's not how it works. Reliability is affected by the design and implementation of the software. If your software wasn't reliable in the beginning, you'll have lots of "fun time" rewriting and even more "fun time" debugging components to try and make it more reliable.

At some point, this is no longer practically viable and the unreliable parts stay as they are. Especially if the unreliability is a design flaw. This is known as "technical debt":

While an expedited solution can accelerate development in the short term, the resulting low quality may increase future costs if left unresolved.

However, failure to prioritize and address the debt can result in reduced maintainability, increased development costs, and risk to production systems.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Technical_debt

As for the 0 priority of testability, I found a test directory in the repo: https://codeberg.org/rimu/pyfedi/src/branch/main/tests

Though I haven't looked at how much the tests cover, there seems to be some sort of testing. So perhaps this importance table is a bit outdated indeed.

although tbf that is only one of several, others being "it's too complex"

As I explained in my original comment, Rust has a few strict rules and concepts that force a particular discipline (I guess you could also call it style of code). And since it has those safety guarantees, you need to have things like lifetimes and trait bounds and such. These things naturally make the code harder to read and/or complicated. But as I said, they are worth it and will save you many bugs that might occur at runtime (especially ones you do not want to debug at runtime. like concurrency bugs).

[–] OpenStars@piefed.social 3 points 13 hours ago

Unfortunately, you can’t just “switch” to more reliability.

For sure, I meant moving forward from that point on, but thanks for filling in the blanks.

At worst, if there was a large team of developers who had coded up the entire project in Python, but then certain sections needed to be re-written, let's even stipulate that it would be in Rust, then it could still be a good thing to have gotten the project off the ground and made such progress, rather than have it be "perfect" but with barely anyone using it? "Don't let perfect be the enemy of good" and all that? (Which could perhaps be used to justify some whoppers of bad decisions, so yeah, I'll preemptively say when used judiciously, as in sometimes even if not always).

although tbf that is only one of several, others being “it’s too complex”

For clarity, when people on Reddit say this, I strongly believe that 99(.99?)% of the time they mean the entire concept of using a federated platform, even as an end-user. People, especially non-technical ones, can end up being remarkably... let's just say "uncurious", and highly resistant to change.

And yes, for many applications I agree that Rust is, if not fully superior to C++ then at least a better choice for an inexperienced programmer to choose to use. This article was enjoyable for me to read on that topic. But... that doesn't make all other languages "wrong" choices, especially if dependent upon others for aid. And all the more so several years ago when that decision of language was made. Like, if the developer(s) simply enjoy using the language, then why not make the whole endeavor fun?

Also as others are pointing out, the existence of library support - notably Flask - is an even larger consideration than the language itself. That is, even if Rust were to be considered superior in virtually all other respects, having such a hard start could still be the deciding factor in favor of that vs. having to write everything from scratch?