In fact, forget the programming language!
this post was submitted on 28 Dec 2025
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I like piefed.
For me, it is how often and how quickly they fix issues. Like someone pointed out a typo earlier today and whenever I went to check on it, it was fixed already.
I saw that! I also see how someone downvoted your comment - it's funny how it's all "let's not fight and all be friends", until someone says something that would unquestionably be good if Lemmy also did it, and then that's somehow "~~bad~~ less relevant information"?
Fwiw I intended this post in good humor. Somehow I did not appreciate how much of a powder keg this issue seems to have (apparently) blown up into becoming.
Fwiw I intended this post in good humor. Somehow I did not appreciate how much of a powder keg this issue seems to have (apparently) blown up into becoming.
Humor, especially self-aware, is intrinsically tied to the concept of meme. Sometimes we forget that.
If this is a dig at Lemmy, Lemmy uses Rust. You'd know that's a popular language if you've kept up with programming news anytime in the last 5 years.
Notice how the OP specifically said well-known and widely used. Yes Rust is currently cool, but way way more people can actually work productively with Python.
Wait… PieFed uses Python? Holy shit… as someone who regularly uses both, Rust is such a better fit for something like this on this scale. That's actually one of the best arguments I've heard against PieFed
Python and bootstrap. Honestly, piefed feels like someone's final cs50 project - which is why I'm hesitant to jump.
Why would it be a better fit?
From what I understand, the limitation in speed/scalability for lemmy/piefed/mbin is the database, not the back end language, so the specific language used appears to matter much less than it would seem.
Piefed has some some pretty great features over lemmy, but for the sysadmin side of things, it has a noticeable improvement regarding network resource usage, and potentially raw speed.
Piefed also appears to be less buggy overall. As an example, Lemmy has suffered from a persistent memory leak that's been around for years, with no fix in sight. You can see the opinion of our sysadmin who has been running slrpnk.net (lemmy instance) for 5 years now to find that just because lemmy is built in a memory-safe language, it doesn't automatically translate to a good experience.
Notice how the OP specifically said well-known and widely used.
I did notice. If Rust isn't "widely used", then I'll need to let Apple, Microsoft, Google, Amazon, Mozilla, Huawei, Meta, the Linux kernel devs, and a fuckload of open-source projects know that they actually don't exist.
It's plently widely used, and unlike ~~a scripting language~~ (edit: Python), it's performant – as server software should be. Rust is not a hard language to use or learn either, and it's great for large projects.
I would be surprised if you'd argue that more devs can write Rust than Python.
Web servers spent most of their time with IO, because the real work is mostly done by the DB. That's why especially Node is very fast and influential design wise. But PHP, Ruby and Python are all very popular and valid choices for web servers. In the end, if you need real performance you have to scale horizontally anyways. And the small gains you make in a compiled language matter even less.
I've learned dozens of languages over 40 years. Rust is one of the hardest I have tried to use for serious projects. It introduces completely new concepts that need to be deeply understood to be productive. It's also one of the most convenient, well-tooled, and expressive languages I've used. But c'mon, as languages go, Rust is deep into BDSM territory.
As someone who routinely works on a complicated C++ codebase, had to use C, Python, and Java all the time through school, has had to use absolute trash like JavaScript and PHP, and has dabbled in languages similar-ish to Rust like Go and Swift, Rust to me is simple to work with.
The compiler is extremely helpful when I do something wrong, it has sensible conventions like immutability by default, Cargo is a streamlined build system, I've found the documentation easy to read, I actually prefer curly brace-delimited scopes to tabbed ones and explicit type declarations for readability, and in the obvious comparison to C/C++, Rust lacks extremely common memory footguns.
Obviously compared to Python – with its mountain of syntax sugar and a library for everything – Rust is going to be more difficult. But for languages in general? Rust is not at all one of the harder ones I've learned or used.
(Btw I hate Java; it's the worst language I've ever used.)
I've had a similar experience. Yes, I have had days where I spent a significant amount of time beating my head against the wall, but that's part of the learning curve. Those days stretched farther apart pretty rapidly.
How many times have you spent an entire day not moving forward on a project because you couldn't figure out what the borrow checker was trying to tell you? Maybe you're just a 10X developer. I feel quite qualified to inform you that for we mere mortals, Rust can very fairly be described as a relatively hard language.
Rust has completely unique paradigms not expressed in any other language! Things that no one coming to Rust has prior experience with. If you cannot admit that makes it harder than some random language that just fucks with syntax, ...dude
You’re right that the first steps with Rust can be trying, but I do think it gets overinflated.
Of all the languages I have both learned to use and deployed something useful to production in, Rust is somewhere in the middle of the “initial difficulty” curve. Harder than Ruby, Python, Perl, C, etc… easier than Erlang, Elixir, Clojure, Haskell, etc.
Rust’s borrow checker is both its best and worst feature; virtually every complaint I have heard about how hard Rust is was about fighting the borrow checker, but the borrow checker has also saved me from some really stupid mistakes and all of the time involved in finding and fixing them. The juice is totally worth the squeeze.
Now if you really hate yourself spend some time learning Prolog. I promise you that Rust will seem a lot more dev friendly afterwards.
I'm surprised you put C in there. Its limited vocabulary does mean you don't have to deal with e.g. C++'s 50 million ways to do something, but this combined with a lack of guardrails makes it agonizingly difficult to do a lot of basic things – most notoriously dealing with strings.
I actually consider C a good beginner language, but only in the sense that 1) it does have that simple toolkit, 2) it and its descendants are widely used, and most importantly 3) the bullshit C makes you deal with gives you a better understanding of what higher-level languages do for you automatically and why. To me, it's probably the hardest mainstream language to learn after maybe something like x86 or ARM assembly (which, for better or worse, hit points 1 and 3 even harder than C).
I generally agree though that Rust has always been somewhere in the middle for me.
This is the most fediverse thread I've seen in years
While I agree with the general sentiment, scripting languages are perfectly fine to use for server software. Would you call hackernews slow? Its been running on lisp (originally Arc, now common lisp) for its entire existence. Another fun example of popular interpreter is, y'know, the JVM.
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It’s not popular if you rate it by actual usage, which is probably more meaningful than it seeming kind of cool.
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- ~~59%~~ (edit: 58% apparently) vs. 15% but who's counting, right?
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it's less about the language than the choice to be welcome to contributors - especially older people who have more free time to devote to unpaid volunteer development, rather than younger people who know Rust but are already working 2-3 jobs
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more to the point it's meant in fun :-P
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The point of ActivityPub is that this exact conversation doesn't matter.
I don't see the point is this dick measuring between piefed and Lemmy, and it is becoming a bit annoying. Don't we have enough problems as is?
Let's just agree to hate on reddit like everyone else does lol.
I agree with you.
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This crusade you have going on against the idea of Rust is getting borderline obsessive. Like when you called it an 'incomplete' language and never explained what that actually means.
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Its actually less about Python (or Rust), but about using well established frameworks (Flask in the case of Piefed), compared to a lot of NIH in the case of Lemmy.
"... And you can spin up your own with blackjack and hookers!"
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