Oh I’m with you there! And otherwise totally understandable.

I think for python tooling the choice is Python Vs Rust. C isn’t in the mix either.

That seems fair. Though I recall Mumba making headway (at least in the anaconda / conda space) and it is a C++ project. AFAIU, their underlying internals have now been folded into conda, which would mean a fairly popular, and arguably successful portion of the tooling ecosystem (I tended to reach for conda and recommend the same to many) is reliant on a C++ foundation.

On the whole, I imagine this is a good thing as the biggest issue Conda had was performance when trying to resolve packaging environments and versions.

So, including C++ as part of C (which is probably fair for the purposes of this discussion), I don’t think C is out of the mix either. Should there ever be a push to fold something into core python, using C would probably come back into the picture too.

I think there’s a survivor bias going on here.

Your survivorship bias point on rust makes a lot of sense … there’s certainly some push back against its evangelists and that’s fair (as someone who’s learnt the language a bit). Though I think it’s fair to point out the success stories are “survivorship” stories worth noting.

But it seems we probably come back to whether fundamental tooling should be done in python or a more performant stack. And I think we just disagree here. I want the tooling to “just work” and work well and personally don’t hold nearly as much interest in being able to contribute to it as I do any other python project. If that can be done in python, all the better, but I’m personally not convinced (my experience with conda, while it was a pure python project, is informative for me here)

Personally I think python should have paid more attention to both built-in tooling (again, I think it’s important to point out how much of this is simply Guido’s “I don’t want to do that” that probably wouldn’t be tolerated these days) and built-in options for more performance (by maybe taking pypy and JIT-ing more seriously).

Maybe the GIL-less work and more performant python tricks coming down the line will make your argument more compelling to people like me.

(Thanks very much for the chat BTW, I personally appreciate your perspective as much as I’m arguing with you)

Yep! And likely the lesson to take from it for Python in general. The general utility of a singular foundation that the rest of the ecosystem can be built out from.

Even that it’s compiled is kinda beside the point. There could have been a single Python tool written in Python and bundled with its own Python runtime. But Guido never wanted to do projects and package management and so it’s been left as the one battery definitely not included.

I feel like this is conflating two questions now.

1. Whether to use a non-Python language where appropriate
2. Whether to use rust over C, which is already heavily used and fundamental in the ecosystem (I think we can put cython and Fortran to the side)

I think these questions are mostly independent.

If the chief criterion is accessibility to the Python user base, issue 2 isn’t a problem IMO. One could argue, as does @eraclito@feddit.it in this thread, that in fact rust provides benefits along these lines that C doesn’t. Rust being influenced by Python adds weight to that. Either way though, people like and want to program in rust and have provided marked success so far in the Python ecosystem (as eraclito cites). It’s still a new-ish language, but if the core issue is C v Rust, it’s probably best to address it on those terms.

Fair, but at some point the “dream” breaks down. Python itself is written in C and plenty of packages, some vital, rely on C or Cython (or fortran) and rust now more and more. So why not the tooling that’s used all the time and doing some hard work and often in build/testing cycles?

If Guido had packaging and project management included in the standard library from ages ago, with parts written in C, no one would bat an eye lid whether users could contribute to that part of the system. Instead, they’d celebrate the “batteries included”, “ease of use” and “zen”-like achievements of the language.

Somewhere in Simon’s blog post he links to a blog post by Armin on this point, which is that the aim is to “win”, to make a singular tool that is better than all the others and which becomes the standard that everyone uses so that the language can move on from this era of chaos. With that motive, the ability for everyday users to contribute is no longer a priority.

Cool to see so many peeps on the Fedi!

While I haven’t used uv (been kinda out of Python for a while), and I understand the concerns some have, the Python community getting concerned about good package/project management tooling is certainly a telling “choice” about how much senior Python devs have gotten used to their ecosystem. Somewhat ditto about concern over using a more performant language for fundamental tooling (rather than pursuing the dream of writing everything in Python, which is now surely dead).

So Simon is probably right in saying (in agreement with others):

while the risk of corporate capture for a crucial aspect of the Python packaging and onboarding ecosystem is a legitimate concern, the amount of progress that has been made here in a relatively short time combined with the open license and quality of the underlying code keeps me optimistic that uv will be a net positive for Python overall

Concerns over maintainability should Astral go down may best be served by learning rust and establishing best practices around writing Python tooling in compiled languages to ensure future maintainability and composability.

Cheers! Very much appreciate the love!

Cheers! Actually not sure exactly why you’re saying this (I’ll take the good vibes though) … but if you’re keen to join in in any way you are most welcome!

Cheers for the shout out! Yea the idea of that community is to be a kind of study group.

Whenever I’ve posted a thought or idea, that’s part question part experiment part pondering, I’ve gotten great replies from others.

Also two people have been running twitch streams of running through the book. Sorrybook is nearly done I think (they’ve been going for half a year now which is quite impressive).

The community is at a point now I suspect where some of us have learnt rust well enough to spread out into projects etc, so it’d be nice to work out how we can do that together at all.

Part of my initial idea with the community was to then have a study group for working through the lemmy codebase, treating it as a helpfully relevant learning opportunity … as we’re all using it, we all probably have features we’d like to add, and the devs and users of it are all right here for feedback.

Additionally, an idea I’ve been mulling over, one which I’d be interested in feedback on … is running further “learning rust” sessions where some of us, including those of us who’ve just “learned” it, actually try to help teach it to new comers.

Having a foundation of material such as “The Book” would make a lot of sense. Where “local teachers” could contribute I think is in posting their own thoughts and perspectives on what is important to take away, what additional ideas, structures or broader connections are worth remembering, and even coming up with little exercises that “learners” could go through and then get feedback on from the “teachers”.

But remote development is a killer feature to me and they seem to be prioritizing it.

Which is definitely interesting and cool. (Also, before this AI “moment”, their main selling point, along with taking graphics more seriously, and rust I suppose).

No worries!

If you’re interested in learning rust (I’ve certainly enjoyed) feel free to try to do so in the community. We’ve just about gone through the main course now, but I can very much see another round starting if people are interested.

The whole idea is to treat contributing as a group learning challenge rather than something onerous and hard.

Otherwise, if you’ve got sql/DB experience, that’s often just as relevant AFAICT (as is the case across the fediverse). I’d bet that if anyone sorts out a good query or schema someone else could integrate it into the code base.

Realistically, try to contribute directly is the likely answer.

Something in between organising and contributing might be starting a community for getting people to help and organise as best as they can on community contributions.

My own community !learningrustandlemmy@lemmy.ml is such an attempt. At the moment it’s been mostly a learning rust community, but getting some group contributions organised was always on the roadmap and now would be a good time to start doing that there if you’re interested.

If you are interested at all in this or the general idea, let me know how I can help.

I mean he’s walking right into this isn’t he!

Oh sorry … I was talking about multi-communities, like for every user not just mods/admins.

I would expect a multi-reddit type function could be built in an app or frontend without needing core Lemmy changes too. Isn’t it just a matter of pulling the data from each community and displaying it in one combined feed?

Yea … but then each front end would need to implement it. Seems like some useful API endpoints would be better so the clients can just focus on the GUI.

awesome-lemmy has definitely gotten more awesome since I last saw it (IE, there are more things there)!!

Though I’m not sure there’s anything there quite touching on what I’m thinking about. I regularly hear about the lack of good moderation tools/interfaces … so I figure it makes sense to start a single project that’s relatively fast moving and comfortable with function creep to give admins/mods the tools or at least interface they want and need. The auto-mod stuff is important too, but the sense I get is that mods and admins feel somewhat blind and helpless with the tools as they are, which feels ripe to me for a richer interface.

Fair!

As an admin … do you think there’d be scope to build and provide a moderation plug-in?

I figure it could be a separate sideloaded server that calls the lemmy API and/or DB as necessary. This way it can be a separate project, be developed more experimentally in a less performance oriented fashion (I’m thinking a Python flask app) as it’s only mods and admins using it, and if it requires work from core lemmy devs should only ever need a new API endpoint (which is less onerous than a whole new feature).

Adding a link to it in the default lemmy UI for mods shouldn’t be too hard either.

Lemmy doesn’t have a lot of must have features (though it’s improving)

Fair, though I’m increasingly thinking multi-communities are pretty much “must-have”

Oh I know … I’m thinking of a feature where any community is allotted a certain amount of “live chat time” where they can run a websocket session for live chats. Presumably there’s a way to manage the resource overhead and get to a sweet spot. Plus, instead of updating everything, it’d only have to be comments in a single post.

Well the error I got in the browser suggests it needs to be in a web socket session or something, so there’s a chance the underlying backend code is still around and functional.

I’ve actually figured bringing the live updates thing back for temporary live chats could be an awesome feature.

This docs seem to nail it down. Couldn’t find that. Thanks!