In this year GSoC, Alejandro is working on Fractal, moving code from the
backend to the client, to try to simplify the code used to communicate with the
matrix.org server and maybe in the future we can replace fractal-matrix-api
with the matrix-rust-sdk. And then we'll have less code in our project to
maintain.
This is a great work, something needed in a project with a technological debt
of several years. I created this project to learn Rust, and also I was learning
about the matrix protocol during the project build. And other contributors do
the same. So we've been building one thing on top another for a lot of years.
In this kind of community driven projects it's the way to go. For some time
we've people interested and developers think about the design and start change
some parts or to write new functionality following a new design pattern. But
voluntary developers motivation change in time and they left the project and
the next one continues the work with a different vision.
It's not something bad, it's the greatness of the open source. Different people
has different motivations to participate in a free software project, and every
contribution is welcome. I'm the maintainer of the project and I've spent a lot
of time building Fractal, but I don't have the same motivation now to work on
the project, to it's good to have other people working on it so it can continue
alive.
Alejandro is doing a great work and he's not a 4 months contributor. He's
working on the backend refactoring for 2 years now, step by step and he has
plans for the future.
Refactoring a big project is always hard, because there's a lot of code
movement and always there's the fear to regressions.
Rust is a great language and it shines when big code refactoring comes to the
scene. If it compiles, you know that there's no memory errors, dangling
pointers and that kind of problems. If it builds it will work.
But maybe it will work different, so the review process is needed to ensure
that the application continues working.
Automated tests are really useful for big code changes and project refactoring,
because you have a quick picture and some certainty that the project is
working. But we don't have tests in fractal :D, so someone should do that.
So here I am. Reviewing large MR, with a lot of lines. At least gitlab
makes this process a bit easier.
What I'm trying to do in the review process is to just read the whole diff and
check if there's some problem in the code. And after every change, I run the
app and I do some tests, trying to use the functionality that could be broken
by those new changes.
This takes a lot of time and it's not something fun to do... But someone has to
do that. And during that process, sometimes I learn something new. Reading code
is an interesting task and try to find bugs in code while reading it, is
something useful. To think about that code, what it does and why.
There are comments.
