Florian HaasFeb 24

Serious question: as a user (not as a developer!), have you ever seen substantial improvement in a piece of a software from a ground-up rewrite?

In other words, have you ever used (but not co-developed) something where the developer(s) decided on stopping evolutionary work and instead embarked on a substantial rewrite, and the outcome as you saw it firsthand was a real improvement?

If so, please state your example. Please stick to personal experience, rather than hearsay. Thanks!

Show threadThibFeb 24

@xahteiwi Element X comes to mind. Element decided to put its legacy clients on life support, then developed a proper Rust SDK to share some code between its iOS, Android and web apps. It rewrote its mobile clients.

On iOS at least, the difference is spectacular for me.

They’re also in the process of refactoring Element Web to progressively port various elements to a better foundation, which doesn’t stop the development of new features.

Show threadMTRNord
@thibaultamartin @xahteiwi funny enough element for me is a counter example. So many features got lost by that rewrite. Also non synapse servers lack compatibility for things like registration since element x has no support for the old API and so on. It for me was enough to not use any element software outside of being told at work
Feb 24 at 12:17pmWeb