Let’s say we don’t care about the backend<>frontend interconnection we see in most JS frameworks. We just want to program the backend. What would be the language of your choice?
I feel like you could’ve asked “what’s your favorite language?” and gotten the same responses. Like, it’s Rust for me. I could argue that because Lemmy is written in Rust, there’s already some mature libraries to work off of, but someone else could argue that for e.g. Ruby, too.
Whatever language you chose you might want to also look at the htmx JS library. It lets you write in your html snippets better interactivity without actually needing to write JS. It basically lets you do things like when you click on an element, it can make a request to your server and replace some other element with the contents your server responds with - all with attributes on HTML tags instead of writing JS. This lets you keep all the state on the backend and lets you write more backend logic without only relying on full page refreshes to update small sections of the page.
For a backend language I would use rust as that is what I am most familiar with now and enjoy using the most. Most languages are adequate at serving backend code though so it is hard to go wrong with anything that you enjoy using. Though with rust I tend to find I have fewer issues when I deploy something as appose to other languages which can cause all sorts of runtime errors as they let you ignore the error paths by default.
C#. Since I’m a .NET developer it’s the stack I’m most familiar with.
Honestly I kind of like the idea of a front end with as little JS as possible.
If I really hate front end, but still want a lot of the responsiveness of a SPA, I’d have to give ASP.NET Blazor a serious thought.
It’s largely all back end driven, with the dynamic elements driven via webassembly that pretty much works like black magic.
Rust, because I’m lazy and I want a compiler that helps me out. Performance is a pretty neat bonus.
Easy, golang. All yall getting a serving of HTML when you enter the templ of htmx.
You’re asking about the backend only, separated from the fronted? The fronted will be HTML only, but independent of the backend anyway?
Doesn’t that mean you’re introducing another interface and a need for another backend for the HTML frontend generating?
If it’s independent, why does the frontend intention matter?
My first choice/exploration would be C#/.NET.
I just ment that there will be nothing special being done there. Server would just send the result in plan HTML, that would be used and styled as a widget in something else later.
Maybe Go, haven’t messed with it at all and it looks interesting enough to try. Other than that I could do C#, since that’s where I have most experience. Maybe node.js if I would want to suffer a bit.
The frontend is HTML only? Then I’d go with C# and ASP.NET Razor pages. Modern language with good DX, performant runtime, and server-side rendering.
Most of my experience is in .NET at work. My professional recommendation is C#, but my personal recommendation is Go. I find Go to be just nicer to code with.
I would want something simple, extensible, and easily readable. I would write in the clearest way possible in Bash with small, single purpose programs handling anything performance critical.
easily readable
Bash
This makes me wonder if you might benefit from exploring more programming languages.
I’ve never found shell scripts (beyond the most trivial tasks) to be especially readable. Bourne-style shells in particular (e.g. bash) have a lot of easy-to-miss nuances that will lead to bugs if not carefully managed.
Hats off to you if you can do a good job of it, but it sounds to me like a recipe for pain when it comes to long-term maintenance.
Any language you’re comfortable with is good for that. Ruby, JS, and Go come to mind the first because they all have solid ActivityPub libraries which are going to save you some time on interconnection. Any programming language can do static html.
I’ve considered doing something similar myself, honestly it would come down to which one has the best libraries/frameworks for it.
Crystal + Kemal (Like Ruby + Sinatra but way faster, compiled) for the backend and templating with ECR (like ERB) and HTMX for the front-end (though HTMX is JS it feels like HTML with added features.
Go could be a good option. I say this as a Rust and Kotlin fanboy.
Rust is great but it’s heavyweight for a simple webserver. Kotlin is great but requires a lot of setup. Golang is super small, compiles very fast and predictably, and has easy concurrency. It’s possible for anyone to contribute to a Go project at any level of experience.
Maybe you might want to reconsider you server library choice in Rust
