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Comment by dom96 | Hacker News Reader

I was at Matthew's talk. Great energy and highly informative talk.

I really wish though that instead of rewriting Synapse in Python 3 that they would adopt Status' new favourite language: Nim :)

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the Synapse port to Python 3 is complete :D However, the next-gen one we're working on (https://github.com/matrix-org/dendrite) is in Go. Nim rocks though, and it'd be wonderful for someone to write a Nim homeserver (especially as we finally have a stable release of the server-server API at last!!)

> the next-gen one we're working on (https://github.com/matrix-org/dendrite) is in Go.

There's also a next-gen performance-oriented server in C++ here: https://github.com/matrix-construct/construct

Can you give a rough idea about how long it will take for Dendrite to be ready? I want to run a homeserver for friends, but I'd like to go straight to Dendrite and not have to deal with Synapse if possible.

it'll be a while yet. we've been focusing on hitting Matrix 1.0 by iterating on the Python codebase (Synapse) rather than diluting the effort by doing it on Dendrite in parallel. Once 1.0 is safely out the door and the first wave of post-1.0 features and perf have landed in Synapse then I suspect Dendrite will see more love.

tl;dr: Synapse is getting (much) better; i wouldn't wait for Dendrite but give Synapse a go on Py3 instead for now.

that said, once Dendrite lands, it should be 1-2 orders of magnitude more efficient by most metrics :)

Thanks. I think you're doing the right thing.

FWIW, I'm running Synapse on a 1/1 instance (1 core, 1 GiB RAM) alongside a bunch of other services, with 4 active (as in: daily) users, and it works reasonably well as long as people don't join large channels (cough #matrix:matrix.org cough). That said, I'm definitely looking forward to Dendrite.

Note that Dendrite is doing a bit more fancy architecture. https://github.com/matrix-org/dendrite/blob/master/DESIGN.md -- there's a bunch of readers and writers, with Kafka in-between to mediate flow of messages.

Whether that's a good or bad thing remains to be seen, but I'm a bit skeptic towards complicating things from the get-go.

IMO, for something that promises to be (and needs to be!) so foundational, it would be best to go with a mature implementation stack, and Go fits that better than Nim.

Was also at the talk. The room was packed!

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