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Sublinks Aims to Be a Drop-In Replacement for Lemmy (wedistribute.org)

submitted 9 months ago by deadsuperhero@lemmy.world to c/fediverse@lemmy.world

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Seems like an interesting effort. A developer is building an alternative Java-based backend to Lemmy's Rust-based one, with the goal of building in a handful of different features. The dev is looking at using this compatibility to migrate their instance over to the new platform, while allowing the community to use their apps of choice.

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[-] Carighan@lemmy.world 11 points 9 months ago

How would you do "better" imports then?

[-] hansl@lemmy.world 8 points 9 months ago

*Vaguely wave arms towards the few dozens languages that do imports right*

I don’t mind Java personally, but let’s not pretend that its import syntax and semantics is at the better side of the spectrum here.

Just look at… Go, Haskell, TypeScript, Rust, even D has a better module system.

[-] Carighan@lemmy.world 4 points 9 months ago* (last edited 9 months ago)

Isn't Go just the equivalent of only doing asterisk-imports in Java, just without (and fair enough, Java has 0 need to do that 😂) repeating the import-keyword?

[-] hansl@lemmy.world 3 points 9 months ago

There are multiple things in Go that make it better.

But just for giving a few thoughts about Java itself;

being able to import a package and use it as a namespace would already go a long way
being able to import multiple things from a package without listing separate line for each items
not having to go from the root of the whole fucking world to import a package would be great
having the ability to do relative imports to the module I’m writing would be great

These are like “module 101” things. Like, you’re right that the IDEs nowadays do most of that, but IDEs also get it wrong (“oh you meant a THAT package instead of that other one”) and reading the code without an IDE is still a thing (code reviews for example) which means the longer the import section (both vertically and horizontally) the harder it is to work with. And if you don’t look at all imports carefully you may miss a bug or a vulnerability.

Also, Java is the only language I know of that has such a span on the horizontal. The memes about needing a widescreen monitor for Java is actually not a joke; I never had to scroll horizontally in any other language. To me that’s just insanity.

Also, if you’re gonna make it the whole universe as the root of your package structure, we already have DNS and URI/URLs for that. Let me use that!

And don’t get me started as only-files-as-packages while simultaneously having maybe-you-have-multiple-root for your code… makes discovery of related files to the one you’re working with very hard. Then of course the over reliance on generated code generating imports that might or might not exist yet because you just cloned your project…