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ZorbaTHut  19hr ago (text post)   964 thread views

Site Backend Changes

Hey there! For complicated reasons, some of which I will explain later, I'm in the middle of dong a pretty gigantic revamp to the Motte codebase. Right now, this means "fix a bunch of small bugs". Later, other things will be happening.

The immediate goal of this is not to massively transform the site or do a Digg v4/New Reddit thing. Frankly, if the site remained exactly the same (but with fewer bugs) I would be happy.

The long-term goal isn't going to be quite that static, though. The long-term goal is to set things up to allow more subcommunities, similar to how subreddits work. This will be a larger set of changes. These changes will not obsolete The Motte itself; I am absolutely aiming for a site that can comfortably keep holding The Motte. I've talked about this before if you want to go read about it - this is still the same plan, for what it's worth, it's just now being (slowly) executed.

I will be posting more, and asking questions about next steps, when actual site behavioral changes are in the queue. This just isn't that! This is infrastructure work.

 

tl;dr: The site backend may be a little wonky for a bit, sorry about that, please report any bugs.

(and mods, feel free to unsticky this in a few days if I forget)

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Why Rust and not Go?

A few answers:

  • Go is a compromise between performance, power, and simplicity, aiming for something that's easy to use even if it's not as capable. Rust basically isn't; it's aiming for absolute performance and power at the expense of being somewhat more complicated. I think this is a bad bargain today, especially because AI is quite good at handling complicated.
  • Rust is much more applicable to me specifically; it's something quite plausibly useful for the game industry while Go just doesn't have much to offer. Also, a minor side project I'm working on is helping with a filesystem being developed, which is also written in Rust. I'd rather be able to triple-dip into the same language than try to diversify (right now all of my projects are limited to C#, Rust, Python, and grudgingly Typescript, and that's already one more than I want.)
  • Rust has a bunch of in-progress formal verification features that I think are pretty cool and it would be nice to be able to apply those.
  • I have some things I want to try out regarding static typing and Rust is much more developed on those fronts than Go (or at least, was in June when I did this research, though I'd be surprised if that's inverted by today.)

helping with a filesystem being developed, which is also written in Rust

Might I ask: bcachefs? Been following it for years, very saddened by the Kent/Linus drama.

Yup.

Kent is definitely abrasive, but he's also really smart, and bcachefs at this point is a surprisingly capable filesystem that does a bunch of stuff no other filesystem can accomplish. With a frankly impressive amount of dedication towards never losing data.

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Why are you called The Motte?

A motte is a stone keep on a raised earthwork common in early medieval fortifications. More pertinently, it's an element in a rhetorical move called a "Motte-and-Bailey", originally identified by philosopher Nicholas Shackel. It describes the tendency in discourse for people to move from a controversial but high value claim to a defensible but less exciting one upon any resistance to the former. He likens this to the medieval fortification, where a desirable land (the bailey) is abandoned when in danger for the more easily defended motte. In Shackel's words, "The Motte represents the defensible but undesired propositions to which one retreats when hard pressed."

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