The Abstract Wikipedia team is working toward a rewrite of our backend services in a different programming language, likely Rust. Node/JS has served us well, but we have run up against some [WebAssembly System Interface] limits that would be best dealt with by switching to a different ecosystem.

  • Aatube@kbin.melroy.orgOP
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    11 days ago

    Somehow, it feels horrifying to use something that high-level for the backend, especially when MediaWiki has so much PHP and the WMF has so many PHP programmers. Maybe my adolescent arse is getting old…

      • elrik@lemmy.world
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        11 days ago

        Calculating the digits of pi seems like a poor benchmark for comparing various languages in the context of backend web application performance. Even the GitHub readme points out the benchmark is entirely focused on floating point performance.

        • setVeryLoud(true);@lemmy.ca
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          11 days ago

          Absolutely, it’s just one aspect of it, benchmarks are always narrow in scope. Some languages may be good at some things and worse at others.