Python absolutely is faster to get things going since it’s a lot more simple and flexible, that was never a point of contention, but it goes back to the issue of tech debt. The more you take advantage of Python’s simplicity and flexibility, the more pain you’ll be in when you need to untangle the mess and work out performance issues later on.
Rust is a finished language, as much as one can be anyway. It’s stable and doesn’t have breaking changes. The editions mechanism means they can introduce more dramatic changes, but your older code will still function by assigning it an edition and you can always upgrade by making the changes necessary to jump to a later edition.
I don’t know much what the performance bottlenecks would look like for a social media platform. Pages themselves can only be so large though I assume that as the total amount of content grows then it would scale more with activity, yet even that would have bounds placed upon it like no ability to comment on posts older than six months. Naively to me that sounds like it could take great advantage of parallelization, and therefore not be as well suited for Python, though perhaps an actual database system is being used? Which is obviously true so to clarify I meant using Python to connect to some more optimized SQL engine, and yet that sounds naive even to my own ears so definitely not trying to pass myself off as an expert.
There may be value in seeing features arrive more quickly though, especially as people are leaving Lemmy to go back to Reddit, so if something could help them want to stay or even help bring in new ones, then even short term benefits may contribute towards a longer term future.
Python absolutely is faster to get things going since it’s a lot more simple and flexible, that was never a point of contention, but it goes back to the issue of tech debt. The more you take advantage of Python’s simplicity and flexibility, the more pain you’ll be in when you need to untangle the mess and work out performance issues later on.
Rust is a finished language, as much as one can be anyway. It’s stable and doesn’t have breaking changes. The editions mechanism means they can introduce more dramatic changes, but your older code will still function by assigning it an edition and you can always upgrade by making the changes necessary to jump to a later edition.
I don’t know much what the performance bottlenecks would look like for a social media platform. Pages themselves can only be so large though I assume that as the total amount of content grows then it would scale more with activity, yet even that would have bounds placed upon it like no ability to comment on posts older than six months. Naively to me that sounds like it could take great advantage of parallelization, and therefore not be as well suited for Python, though perhaps an actual database system is being used? Which is obviously true so to clarify I meant using Python to connect to some more optimized SQL engine, and yet that sounds naive even to my own ears so definitely not trying to pass myself off as an expert.
There may be value in seeing features arrive more quickly though, especially as people are leaving Lemmy to go back to Reddit, so if something could help them want to stay or even help bring in new ones, then even short term benefits may contribute towards a longer term future.