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I don't mean to be disrespectful. The first time I heard of Matrix/Riot was at OSCOn 2015. What has happened since then,and why has it taken so long to stabiliz

I don't mean to be disrespectful. The first time I heard of Matrix/Riot was at OSCOn 2015. What has happened since then,and why has it taken so long to stabilize?

Arathorn 9y ago
We spent massive effort working on: * implementing E2E encryption and getting it audited, which turns out to be very hard in a decentralised environment * refining Riot as a flagship client and trying to get it to a Slack/Discord level of UX (still a work in progress) * scaling, as the 1st gen implementation (synapse) failed to keep up with the growth of the network * adding features like Jitsi video conferencing, Widgets, Communities, Home pages, Rich Text Editing, Read Receipts, Synchronised Read Markers and much much more. * dealing with a major funding crisis last year. In retrospect we probably should have spent more time finalising the current features rather than adding on new ones, and since the end of last year we've been feature-frozen in order to finish the stuff in hand and get to a 1.0. Fixing the issues which remain in federated state resolution is probably the hardest problem to solve before a 1.0, and I'm happy to say that over the last few months we've made major progress in doing so. Agreed that in an ideal world this would have all happened sooner, but turns out that decentralised open protocols are harder than centralised startups like Slack and friends. Who knew?
- Arathorn 9y ago
  (oh, and we rewrote (almost) the whole thing in Go, too)
  - acct1771 9y ago
    I saw someone bitching elsewhere about Python 2.7, but have yet to see any other semi-relevant complaints yet, so congrats to the team on that! Any comment on that?
    - lub 9y ago
      There is progress on Python 3 support: > Preparation for py3 (PR #3061, #3073, #3074, #3075, #3103, #3104, #3106, #3107, #3109, #3110) Thanks to @NotAFile! https://github.com/matrix-org/synapse/releases/tag/v0.28.0 https://github.com/matrix-org/synapse/releases/tag/v0.28.0
  - egeozcan 9y ago
    Go is a great choice for implementing a network protocol but most of the time, rewriting is not a great choice (source needed). Do you have any public discussions or blog posts about this decision?
    - fredoliveira 9y ago
      Why would rewriting not be a great choice?
      - ysleepy 9y ago
        Second System Syndrome [1] and General experience [2] mostly because legacy systems contain a lot of implicit features and undocumented decisions that are hard to re-discover and customers get really annoyed. Maybe less of a problem in this case since it is young and rather well defined domain. [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Second-system_effect https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Second-system_effect [2] https://www.joelonsoftware.com/2000/04/06/things-you-should-never-do-part-i/ https://www.joelonsoftware.com/2000/04/06/things-you-should-...
      - mikekchar 9y ago
        It's normally death for a company initiative. The problem is that it takes time for the rewrite to happen. While it's tempting to believe that since you wrote it once that it will be quick to write it again, usually it takes about the same amount of time to rewrite. This leads to vastly underestimating the time scale required. At the same time, the business tends to look about 6 weeks out. For those 6 weeks they are fine, but usually a "disaster" happens and you are required to make a "quick fix" to the original. "Disaster" after "disaster" happens and normally the rewrite is abandoned. Sometimes it continues, and when you finish you discover that nobody remembered about a really crucial set of requirements that are all but impossible to implement in the new system. However, in an open source project rewrites are often successful. Sometimes it frustrates the users in the process (see GTK/Gnome/KDE rewrites) but often there is not enough pressure to kill the rewrite so it succeeds. Whether or not you'd be better off with the original is often an open question, though. I don't know enough about Matrix/Riot to comment about whether their rewrite was a good idea. I hope they are happy with it.

I don't mean to be disrespectful. The first time I heard of Matrix/Riot was at OSCOn 2015. What has happened since then,and why has it taken so long to stabilize?

Arathorn 9y ago

We spent massive effort working on: * implementing E2E encryption and getting it audited, which turns out to be very hard in a decentralised environment * refining Riot as a flagship client and trying to get it to a Slack/Discord level of UX (still a work in progress) * scaling, as the 1st gen implementation (synapse) failed to keep up with the growth of the network * adding features like Jitsi video conferencing, Widgets, Communities, Home pages, Rich Text Editing, Read Receipts, Synchronised Read Markers and much much more. * dealing with a major funding crisis last year. In retrospect we probably should have spent more time finalising the current features rather than adding on new ones, and since the end of last year we've been feature-frozen in order to finish the stuff in hand and get to a 1.0. Fixing the issues which remain in federated state resolution is probably the hardest problem to solve before a 1.0, and I'm happy to say that over the last few months we've made major progress in doing so. Agreed that in an ideal world this would have all happened sooner, but turns out that decentralised open protocols are harder than centralised startups like Slack and friends. Who knew?

Arathorn 9y ago
(oh, and we rewrote (almost) the whole thing in Go, too)
- acct1771 9y ago
  I saw someone bitching elsewhere about Python 2.7, but have yet to see any other semi-relevant complaints yet, so congrats to the team on that! Any comment on that?
  - lub 9y ago
    There is progress on Python 3 support: > Preparation for py3 (PR #3061, #3073, #3074, #3075, #3103, #3104, #3106, #3107, #3109, #3110) Thanks to @NotAFile! https://github.com/matrix-org/synapse/releases/tag/v0.28.0 https://github.com/matrix-org/synapse/releases/tag/v0.28.0
- egeozcan 9y ago
  Go is a great choice for implementing a network protocol but most of the time, rewriting is not a great choice (source needed). Do you have any public discussions or blog posts about this decision?
  - fredoliveira 9y ago
    Why would rewriting not be a great choice?
    - ysleepy 9y ago
      Second System Syndrome [1] and General experience [2] mostly because legacy systems contain a lot of implicit features and undocumented decisions that are hard to re-discover and customers get really annoyed. Maybe less of a problem in this case since it is young and rather well defined domain. [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Second-system_effect https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Second-system_effect [2] https://www.joelonsoftware.com/2000/04/06/things-you-should-never-do-part-i/ https://www.joelonsoftware.com/2000/04/06/things-you-should-...
    - mikekchar 9y ago
      It's normally death for a company initiative. The problem is that it takes time for the rewrite to happen. While it's tempting to believe that since you wrote it once that it will be quick to write it again, usually it takes about the same amount of time to rewrite. This leads to vastly underestimating the time scale required. At the same time, the business tends to look about 6 weeks out. For those 6 weeks they are fine, but usually a "disaster" happens and you are required to make a "quick fix" to the original. "Disaster" after "disaster" happens and normally the rewrite is abandoned. Sometimes it continues, and when you finish you discover that nobody remembered about a really crucial set of requirements that are all but impossible to implement in the new system. However, in an open source project rewrites are often successful. Sometimes it frustrates the users in the process (see GTK/Gnome/KDE rewrites) but often there is not enough pressure to kill the rewrite so it succeeds. Whether or not you'd be better off with the original is often an open question, though. I don't know enough about Matrix/Riot to comment about whether their rewrite was a good idea. I hope they are happy with it.