Is it speed? Features? Ease of development? Just curious why lemmy is seeing more activity as opposed to other networks.

  • Frost Wolf@lemmy.worldOP
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    1 year ago

    I’m not a techie but is there inherent pros to being written in rust rather than php? Big forums were powered by php back then (phpBB, XenForo, to name).

    • d3Xt3r@lemmy.world
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      1 year ago

      The other poster failed to mention the biggest advantage of Rust - it’s inherently a lot more secure and a lot less vulnerable to bugs compared to other languages. For starters, Rust is designed to eliminate common programming errors like null pointer dereferencing, buffer overflows, and data races, which can lead to serious security vulnerabilities.

      Also, variables in Rust are immutable by default, which means they cannot be changed once they’re set. It’s also strongly typed, which is strictly enforced and there are no implicit conversions. PHP, however, is loosely typed and does perform implicit type conversion, which can lead to unexpected results and potential security vulnerabilities.

      I could go on, but then we’d be getting a bit too technical for this space.

      • Frost Wolf@lemmy.worldOP
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        1 year ago

        Thank you for explaining. I grew up on php-based forums and websites. So Rust is pretty new to me. TBH, I haven’t heard of it until Lemmy. :)

    • lightsecond@programming.dev
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      1 year ago

      In terms of raw performance, compiled languages like C, C++, and Rust are much faster than interpreted languages like PHP, Python, and Ruby.

      The difference between compilation and interpretation is the difference between you reading the translation of a foreign book versus an interpreter reading each line in the original book and telling you its meaning in your language every time you want to read the book.

      Java, Kotlin and Scala are somewhat in between in terms of speed. Code that gets called a lot gets compiled just in time.