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Matrix at FOSDEM 2019

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Re: Matrix at FOSDEM 2019

#11

Post by senora_acero »

Arathorn wrote: post #7
dom96 wrote: post #4

I was at Matthew's talk. Great energy and highly informative talk. I really wish though that instead of rewriting Synapse in Python 3 that they would adopt Status' new favourite language: Nim :)

the Synapse port to Python 3 is complete :D However, the next-gen one we're working on ( https://github.com/matrix-org/dendrite ) is in Go. Nim rocks though, and it'd be wonderful for someone to write a Nim homeserver (especially as we finally have a stable release of the server-server API at last!!)

> the next-gen one we're working on (https://github.com/matrix-org/dendrite) is in Go.

There's also a next-gen performance-oriented server in C++ here: https://github.com/matrix-construct/construct

Re: Matrix at FOSDEM 2019

#12

Post by int_19h »

dom96 wrote: post #4

I was at Matthew's talk. Great energy and highly informative talk. I really wish though that instead of rewriting Synapse in Python 3 that they would adopt Status' new favourite language: Nim :)

IMO, for something that promises to be (and needs to be!) so foundational, it would be best to go with a mature implementation stack, and Go fits that better than Nim.

Re: Matrix at FOSDEM 2019

#13

Post by priansh »

When rewriting Synapse in Python 3, did you use new language level features and optimizations? And what was your experience in doing so?

I've heard a lot on both sides of the fence as far as adopting python 3 exclusive language features for optimizations as well as using Cython everywhere but I'm not really sure where consensus lands. Kudos to you however, this is one of my favorite projects and will continue to be!

Re: Matrix at FOSDEM 2019

#14

Post by donpdonp »

the matrix is the great irc replacement that never was. i wanted to like the matrix, i still do, yet every time I use it, the list of terrible user experiences remains the same. its slow. its so slow. the riot design/layout is klunky. its slow. the federation is confusing. for example searching or browsing the list of channels 'works' maybe 5% of the time and its not clear how broad the search is attempting to be. its slow. I've got an invite that cannot be accepted or declined, so its there forever. its slow. the distinction between a person to person chat vs a room is confusing. i cant get the freenode bridge bot to change my nick. it says the bridge bot is offline when im talking to it and its responding.

there has been time to fix all this but it has happened. at this point I'm not sure if the api is simply hard to implement or if the go-lang server will help.

i've even looked at the ircv3 spec for innovation. thats how desperate ive become for some kind of advancement (grin). I enjoy writing chatbots and new features are hindered by irc's lack of per-message ID. I've run a synapse server and an irc bridge and was disappointed in the complexity and resource usage. so i stay in 1992 with good ol' irc and freenode.

Re: Matrix at FOSDEM 2019

#15

Post by Arathorn »

priansh wrote: post #13

When rewriting Synapse in Python 3, did you use new language level features and optimizations? And what was your experience in doing so? I've heard a lot on both sides of the fence as far as adopting python 3 exclusive language features for optimizations as well as using Cython everywhere but I'm not really sure where consensus lands. Kudos to you however, this is one of my favorite projects and will continue to be!

Synapse currently runs on both Python 2 and 3, so we're not using any of the Python 3 specific language level features yet. We're considering dropping Python 2 support around April however to open up all the Py3 specific stuff.

We've seen significant perf improvements anyway however - both due to switching to UTF8 for string encoding and some dict operations getting much faster.

https://matrix.org/blog/2018/12/21/porting-synapse-to-python... has all the gory details :)

Re: Matrix at FOSDEM 2019

#16

Post by Arathorn »

donpdonp wrote: post #14

the matrix is the great irc replacement that never was. i wanted to like the matrix, i still do, yet every time I use it, the list of terrible user experiences remains the same. its slow. its so slow. the riot design/layout is klunky. its slow. the federation is confusing. for example searching or browsing the list of channels 'works' maybe 5% of the time and its not clear how broad the search is attempting to be. it…

have you tried riot.im/develop for a less clunky riot?

in terms of perf: yup, synapse is still nothing like as performant as it should be. as the talk in the OP explains, we opted to focus on getting a 1.0 which is 'correct' (in terms of stability and bugs and no design flaws) rather than fast. Fast comes next, and it should be more than noticeable.

Re: Matrix at FOSDEM 2019

#17

Post by donpdonp »

Arathorn wrote: post #16
donpdonp wrote: post #14

the matrix is the great irc replacement that never was. i wanted to like the matrix, i still do, yet every time I use it, the list of terrible user experiences remains the same. its slow. its so slow. the riot design/layout is klunky. its slow. the federation is confusing. for example searching or browsing the list of channels 'works' maybe 5% of the time and its not clear how broad the search is attempting to be. it…

have you tried riot.im/develop for a less clunky riot? in terms of perf: yup, synapse is still nothing like as performant as it should be. as the talk in the OP explains, we opted to focus on getting a 1.0 which is 'correct' (in terms of stability and bugs and no design flaws) rather than fast. Fast comes next, and it should be more than noticeable.

thanks for the tip on riot.im/develop. looks like progress.

Re: Matrix at FOSDEM 2019

#18

Post by rakoo »

gonehome wrote: post #6
rys wrote: post #2

I’ve learned about, installed, and configured both Synapse (official Python server implementation) and riot-web (browser version of Riot, the official client) recently, to give me and some friends a post-IRC means of modern, secured chat. There are some wrinkles, but in the main I think the project is making significant progress on making the whole thing work well for both admins of the hosted server and riot-web, an…

Do you have an idea how this compares to Keybase.io and their team based chat? What's the main difference with matrix? Is Keybase something you were aware of and decided against for some reason?

I might sound dismissive, but in my views Keybase is entirely focused on being an identity provider; all the other tools they've been developing on the side are nice to play with and will probably be the ones bringing in money to them, but at the core they're not really reinventing the wheel, and wouldn't have any value without the powerful and simple-as-dirt reliable identification platform they provide. I might be completely off but I'm sure their dream would be that any new protocol would care about the exchange of data, and leave authentication and identity checking to them.

Re: Matrix at FOSDEM 2019

#19

Post by jasonzemos »

donpdonp wrote: post #14

the matrix is the great irc replacement that never was. i wanted to like the matrix, i still do, yet every time I use it, the list of terrible user experiences remains the same. its slow. its so slow. the riot design/layout is klunky. its slow. the federation is confusing. for example searching or browsing the list of channels 'works' maybe 5% of the time and its not clear how broad the search is attempting to be. it…

Independent Matrix Server developer here. You might be interested in a community-driven implementation that I work on which aims to address these issues. I'm delighted to read from you here that we share a goal for a great IRC replacement: https://github.com/matrix-construct/construct

Re: Matrix at FOSDEM 2019

#20

Post by meruru »

Arathorn wrote: post #7
dom96 wrote: post #4

I was at Matthew's talk. Great energy and highly informative talk. I really wish though that instead of rewriting Synapse in Python 3 that they would adopt Status' new favourite language: Nim :)

the Synapse port to Python 3 is complete :D However, the next-gen one we're working on ( https://github.com/matrix-org/dendrite ) is in Go. Nim rocks though, and it'd be wonderful for someone to write a Nim homeserver (especially as we finally have a stable release of the server-server API at last!!)

Can you give a rough idea about how long it will take for Dendrite to be ready? I want to run a homeserver for friends, but I'd like to go straight to Dendrite and not have to deal with Synapse if possible.
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