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Revolt: Open-source alternative to Discord

revolt.chat

81–90 of 413 posts

Re: Revolt: Open-source alternative to Discord

#81

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> memory safe That's an incorrect assumption if you haven't audited the code. > likely to be written by a someone that cares about performance and efficiency Ah, the stamp of approval that comes from signalling to the "right people". Reminds me of the preamble to almost every C++ Boost library -- "written with performance in mind".

>> memory safe > That's an incorrect assumption if you haven't audited the code. Audit the code? Simply `grep unsafe`.

Well, perhaps `rg unsafe` if you want to use the rust counterpart to grep, ripgrep ;)

Re: Revolt: Open-source alternative to Discord

#83

Earlier quoted context omitted.

For me I think “written in Rust”actually does add a lot. It is a signal that this will be easy to build, easy to deploy (because it is compiled into a single binary in general), memory safe, and likely to be written by a someone that cares about performance and efficiency. I think those are all valuable hints.

> memory safe That's an incorrect assumption if you haven't audited the code. > likely to be written by a someone that cares about performance and efficiency Ah, the stamp of approval that comes from signalling to the "right people". Reminds me of the preamble to almost every C++ Boost library -- "written with performance in mind".

I didn't know about that preamble, but I definitely got the vibe of "written on a write-only mindset"... just from reading their docs :) not to say trying to delve in the source code!

Re: Revolt: Open-source alternative to Discord

#84
I hate the name personally. I would not feel comfortable asking a normal person (or, now that I think about it, even someone tech-savvy and privacy conscious) “hey come and join my Revolt server”.

At best, it sounds like I’d be inviting them to play some online game.

Re: Revolt: Open-source alternative to Discord

#85
post #18

Curious why you decided to use MongoDB as opposed to HBase or Cassandra? Discord moved away from MongoDB because its sharding is “complicated to use and not known for stability.” Are these issues not relevant anymore?

Hi, one of the developers here, there was no specific reason why we went mongo at the start, but there have been talks to move to a different database if needed. Currently mongodb is fine for us.

> Currently mongodb is fine for us.

As someone who has administered too many MongoDBs, those are some famous last words.

Re: Revolt: Open-source alternative to Discord

#86
post #54

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> memory safe That's an incorrect assumption if you haven't audited the code. > likely to be written by a someone that cares about performance and efficiency Ah, the stamp of approval that comes from signalling to the "right people". Reminds me of the preamble to almost every C++ Boost library -- "written with performance in mind".

I guess Rust isn't guaranteed to be memory safe considering unsafe blocks but it does make it much more memory safe than languages which only offer manual memory management.

Just `leak` all your variables before they go out of scope ;)

Re: Revolt: Open-source alternative to Discord

#87

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Their FAQ on “Why no federation?” is relevant: https://developers.revolt.chat/faq/federation

> "In terms of the situation, we started the project when none of us even knew what federation was, so it was never even considered from the start." Well, yes, it is honest, but it also is disturbing - which other well-known network principles were unknown to them?

Is it really "disturbing" if it's maintained by mostly college students? If this was done by industry veterans I could understand your stance, but the way things are this feels uncalled for.

Re: Revolt: Open-source alternative to Discord

#88
post #4

How does it compare to matrix? Would have been nice to use that since it’s an open protocol that already takes privacy seriously

My question, maybe a bit more meta - is why not instead work on features for matrix and a client like element? As if the world needs yet another slack-like. xkcd_15_competing_standards.png

Contributing is hard. U have to follow 3rd party rules.

Re: Revolt: Open-source alternative to Discord

#89
post #3

Not sure "written in Rust" is a headline thing that's worth mentioning anymore. Particularly amusing in this case when parts of Discord are written in Rust too.

Also, only the backend is written in Rust. The desktop client is an Electron app: https://github.com/revoltchat/desktop

Re: Revolt: Open-source alternative to Discord

#90
post #19
post #6

Earlier quoted context omitted.

That’s a shame. Node is quite easy to run. Biggest problem is that installing any app includes a free black hole.

JS and Rust are best friends. Deno is written in Rust. And many Node native libs are being written in Rust.

It's not JS or node that's the problem, it's the JS ecosystem. Badly or too broadly defined dependencies can (and do) lead to pulling a new version of a dep that introduced a breaking API change and tada, you have to start hunting for the right version.

Most projects don't define the node version that their project runs on either, so what ran in node 8 might not run in node 14 now.

What's wonderful to run into is non-JS dependencies: node-gyp happens to be used here and there. Sometimes the native lib will be pulled, sometimes it will be built, who knows why. And node-gyp might then depend on python2 which might not even be present on newer distros anymore.

And so on and so forth. If it doesn't come in an AppImage or docker image, there's no chance I'm getting myself into a node mess.

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