Lemmy is an open-source, federated link aggregator and discussion platform similar to Reddit, Lobste.rs, or Hacker News. The software stack used in Lemmy includes Rust with Actix and Diesel for the backend, and TypeScript with Inferno for the frontend.

The developers chose Rust for its performance, safety, and concurrency features, which help in building a reliable and efficient backend. Actix is a popular Rust web framework that provides a lightweight and fast foundation for the server-side application. Diesel is a Rust ORM (Object-Relational Mapping) and query builder that simplifies database interactions. On the frontend, TypeScript offers better type safety and tooling compared to plain JavaScript, while Inferno is a fast and lightweight React-like library for building user interfaces. These technologies were chosen to create a performant, reliable, and easily deployable platform.

I read someone saying that the lack of contributors was due to the software stack being unconventional and takes people a while to get used to it. So I was curious to know what other people would have used.

  • abhibeckert@lemmy.world
    158·
    1 year ago

    I’d have gone with PHP. Modern PHP is really good, all the tools are mature, the few drawbacks it has are well understood and easily worked around, and it’s an easy language to learn with a huge community of people who already know it.

    For a project this large and widely used - I wouldn’t use a framework and that’s another area where PHP really shines. The standard library is very comprehensive, and all of the major frameworks are split into smaller modules which can be used standalone and interact with modules from other frameworks.

    So you can bootstrap the project and get to a working proof of concept quickly by using well tested and well written third party code, then later when you need lower memory footprints/etc it’s trivial to fork those modules and and reduce them to just the core features you are actually using in your project.