WikiLambda, backend for Wikifunctions, rewrites itself from Node.js (!!) to Rust

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www.wikifunctions.org/wiki/Wikifunctions:Status…

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.

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Wikidata is *so* cool, but not really public-exposed. I imagine it's an incredible research tool though.

 
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Wikifunctions finally exposed running functions via API in March, though yeah, it's still a long, long way from being integrated in wikis, not to mention the arcane parameter that is passing a JSON via URL. (and hopefully you meant Wikifunctions and not Wikidata lol)

 
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Oh I understood wikifunctions primarily as a way to operate on wikidata data, I don't know if that's right. And you're right it is publically *available*, I guess I meant more that few few folks *know* about it.

 
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It's quite independent from Wikidata. It's an alpha-stage programming functions repository.

 
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Node.js is really not a bad backend language, since it's JIT, it's actually faster than Python and Java in most cases.

Rust will definitely have the advantage of being a compiled language though.

Source: I write both Java and TS backend code, have done benchmarks.

 
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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...

 
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Oh PHP is hands down one of the slowest languages out there. It's just convenient because it's easy to host, but it's awful to use and it's really slow.

Here, have a chart:

In this chart, where the benchmark is calculating digits of π, Java is faster than JS, but there are cases where it's the opposite.

https://github.com/niklas-heer/speed-comparison?tab=readme-ov-file

 
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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.

 
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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.

 
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since it's JIT, it's actually faster than Python and Java in most cases.

Java is JIT'd too, and Python can be depending on which runtime you deploy.

 
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True, I didn't structure my sentence correctly.

It gets to compete with Java and Python because it's also JIT is what I meant to say.

 
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