VOAT back-end?

25    06 Jul 2015 08:26 by u/ali_

Why is VOAT written on antiquated tech (ASP.net). Why did they choose such a dog-shit framework that will scale terribly?

The site can't be anywhere close to complicated. Are they going to bother rewriting in something more modern while its still in its infancy? I put my voat in for Rails, at least then they might get people interested in contributing to the project.

Can we get a discussion going regarding the state of this site? They can't seriously expect ASP.net to be a permanent solution.....can they?

20 comments

52

Yes, we should rewrite the entire thing to Go. I mean Rust. I mean Nim. I mean Crystal. Wait, what's the flavor of the month again? There's nothing wrong with .NET. Isn't Reddit even written in Python, which is considerable slower than CLR? Either way, it doesn't matter. I also don't see how you can suggest Rails over any other alternative out there. This post reeks of trolling. The mere fact you think a project like this can't be anywhere close to complicated shows your post has to be taken with a grain of salt already.

1

Doesn't .NET mean they're using Windows?

2

Aside from Mono, .NET is slowly turning cross platform via Roslyn. I wrote a small game engine in .NET/Mono on Linux a few years ago. Worked fine :)

1

C or GTFO ;)

In all seriousness, is there any way I can sign up to volunteer to help on Voat's backend?

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11

How do you figure .net antiquated?

1

Especially with all the new cool thinks they are doing with Roslyn and ASP.NET vNext.

0

I've been mostly doing sharepoint dev work for the past 7 years but recently started getting back into real dev work. I am amazed at how things have come.

8

There has already been such a discussion over here and here.

4

I've seen sites written in plenty of languages that scale exceptionally well and sites written in plenty of languages that scale terribly. The platform doesn't matter nearly as much as how well the system is designed and implemented. Obviously some platforms make doing the right thing easier than others but at the end of the day, if you don't know what you're really doing then you're going to struggle to build a scalable system regardless of what stack you happen to be using.

4

Don't feed the trolls

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There's nothing wrong with ASP or C#. As a matter of fact I think both of those choices on a purely technical basis are superior to what reddit is running. The only problem I see in terms of scaling out is the data store which is MSSQL. However MSSQL can go a pretty long way before it needs to be replaced with some NoSQLy AP thing like Cassandra.

Why do you think Rails (ruby) will scale better than C#? CLR's concurrency/gc/jit/overall speed story is superior to ruby. If you want to use Rails you better be prepared to work around the GIL. Unless you meant JRuby which implies the JVM and I really doubt that's what you meant.

Your statements about voat's code being not that complicated leads me to believe you've never written something like voat before and assume it's simple when it isn't. In my experience if code for a big project like voat looks simple it's because the creators have spent a lot of time and effort thinking about design and organization of the code base coupled with an understanding of the problem space. "Any intelligent fool can make things bigger, more complex, and more violent. It takes a touch of genius -- and a lot of courage -- to move in the opposite direction."

1

Must be written in Laravel. The old and good PHP.

0

Why not NodeJS? Isn't that what everybody says works best for sites with tons of concurrency?

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There are other languages like Go and Elixir(runs on top of Erlang VM) that are much better at concurrency. Also Node scales like horse shit and it's just slow and painful to work with.

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I dont think ASP.net/C# is bad but who the hell wants to code in that? It's just not cool, which will make hiring more difficult. They should have written the back-end in Java at the very least if not something like Python, Go, Elixir or Nim.