Would memory safety greatly benefit the platform? Performance could also see an improvement. I also think the never ending discourse bugs could be reduced with Rust. Will discourse as a modern platform survive without being rewritten in Rust? With the ease and efficiency of Rust development labour shouldn’t be an issue. Thoughts?

I’m pretty sure that it takes at least 12-16 days to upgrade to a new version of Ruby or postgres. There are about 60K lines of Ruby. What would replace Rails?

Microsoft has very deep pockets and resources. One you would need to rewrite core and also all plugins. This would also mean the road map would need to be put on hold. Could it be done sure. But you also need to test and debug. Current customers of discourse would likely have their sites break. Imho if the team were to work on this. It would need to be worked on as a fork with beta testers over a long period of time. Forking plugins for say Discourse2 Meta. So not likely reasonable at this time to divide resources to maintain current ruby & porting.

[image] tsk: It could be done in 12-16 days Sorry is that a typo, did you mean months? Can you point to a single project of similar size and scope to Discourse where such a port has been achieved in such a short timeframe?

[image] The Magpie Developer I’ve often thought that software developers were akin to Magpies, birds notorious for stealing shiny items to decorate their complex nests. Like Magpies, software developers are unusually smart and curious creatures, almost by definition. But we are... I bet the process David Megginson outlines sounds awfully familiar: Elite (guru) developers notice too many riff-raff using their current programming language, and start looking for something that will distinguish them better from their mediocre colleagues. Elite developers take their shopping list of current annoyances and look for a new, little-known language that apparently has fewer of them. Elite developers start to drive the development of the new language, contributing code, writing libraries, etc., then evangelize the new language. Sub-elite (senior) developers follow the elite developers to the new language, creating a market for books, training, etc., and also accelerating the development and testing of the language. Sub-elite developers, who have huge influence (elite developers tend to work in isolation on research projects rather than on production development teams), begin pushing for the new language in the workplace. The huge mass of regular developers realize that they have to start buying books and taking courses to learn a new language. Elite developers notice too many riff-raff using their current programming language, and start looking for something that will distinguish them better from their mediocre colleagues. Who cares what technology you use, as long as it works, and both you and your users are happy with it? That’s the beauty of new things: there’s always a new one coming along. Don’t let the pursuit of new, shiny things accidentally become your goal. Avoid becoming a magpie developer. Be selective in your pursuit of the shiny and new, and you may find yourself a better developer for it.

Wow. Hope you were just being humorous.

Could always ask here, they might know :grin: [image] The Rust Programming Language Forum General discussion of The Rust Programming Language

Perhaps because Rust enthusiasts are using Discourse? Or maybe if porting would take only two workingdays they would already done it, just for sport and fun?

I am so stunned by this thread that I won’t need my daily medication today :heart:

[image] tsk: Would memory safety greatly benefit the platform? Discourse is memory-safe. Ruby is a memory safe language; all garbage collected languages are. The main difference to Rust in this regard is when the safety checks are performed; Rust does them at compile time, Ruby does them at runtime. [image] tsk: I also think the never ending discourse bugs could be reduced with Rust. Rust tackles only a few classes of errors, mainly those caused by C++'s lack of garbage collection. It certainly is cool that they found a way to do that while maintaining the performance benefits theoretically possible with pointers, but it by no means prevents the sort of bugs you’d see as a user. For example, if I use < when I meant <=, and get an off-by-one error as a result, Rust won’t save me. If I forget to spawn a success message after an action is complete, Rust won’t save me. What actually does prevent bugs is the sort of test-driven development Discourse already deploys. There are very few projects which you can just deploy straight from master and expect them to be stable, but Discourse is one of them. [image] tsk: Will discourse as a modern platform survive without being rewritten in Rust? “modern platforms” are popping up left, right and center using JavaScript for backend and frontend. Ruby is 2 places behind Rust in popularity (Kotlin is between the two), so it’s hardly a rare language at the moment. Sure, in another 10 years things may look differently, but even a rewrite to Rust would be tech debt in 10 years. [image] tsk: It could be done in 12-16 days with some blood sweat and tears It’s hard to convey just how naive that statement is, which is why everyone is laughing at the idea. I’ve seen my devs refactor code for 3 years now, and they’re only just ready to start porting from wxWidgets/ShuttleGUI to Qt/QML - which, for context, is a migration from C++ to C++, just a different UI toolkit. It’s just hard to transform code while also ensuring that the behavior stays identical. 12-16 days is the time you’d need just for planning before anyone gets started probably.

Why hasn't Discourse been rewritten in Rust?

Development

JammyDodger July 23, 2024, 2:28pm 23

As we don’t have any plans to rewrite the app in either Rust or Go I think this conversation is a little moot.

I’m going to close this topic off now.

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Why hasn't Discourse been rewritten in Rust?

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