Where should the compiler team (and perhaps working groups) chat?

[davidtwco]

Since the Discord devs are up for listening to our needs, perhaps we could get them to include the threaded model? (Tho it’s a big ask… cc @steveklabnik)

It’s worth noting that the Zulip team are also interested in better supporting open source projects like Rust. Just yesterday, there was a small discussion about this discussion in the Zulip organisation’s chat where Tim Abbott, the lead developer of Zulip said:

I should mention that in general we’re quite responsive to the needs of open source projects; if folks involved with Rust want to talk to some of the open source projects that have adopted Zulip and been really happy with it, we can set that up.

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Personally I wouldn’t mind trying Zulip out. Threading could be useful for lang team discussions as well to organize topics better. Another mechanism could also be to make more channels such as #design-impl-Trait , etc.

This would work for things like #design-impl-Trait but would struggle to be as flexible as Zulip’s model when it comes to a channel per issue (which is effectively how the NLL working group is using Zulip’s threads currently).

[nikomatsakis]

It’s worth noting that the Zulip team are also interested in better supporting open source projects like Rust.

It seems like we should talk to them about moderation features like bans.

[nikomatsakis]

Another mechanism could also be to make more channels such as #design-impl-Trait , etc.

I’m been trying that, but I’ve not found it particularly satisfying. One of the things I think I like about the threaded model is that they are relatively small and transient – you can create a new one effortlessly, and once a particular conversation is done, it kind of fades away. Making a new persistent channel is useful, but it’s a kind of “decision” to do it, and then you have to “decide” to remove it later on… it just doesn’t quite serve the same purpose.

[Centril]

The threading model, while awesome, is also what makes Zulip a bit more inaccessable for many folks, and one of the reasons we didn’t choose it when we decided to announce Discord.

Idea: Maybe the threading model could be opt-in per channel to have our cake and eat it too?

[skade]

I don’t see us changing any of those products substantially.

[Soni]

What about stack overflow chat?

• Moderated
• Accessible (if you’ve made like one or two questions on stack overflow, you can talk, and they need not be high-quality questions either. anyone can read tho.)
• Has replies/threads
• Ability to like messages
• Top 3/5 (I forgot) messages
• History

[joepie91]

Another contender is Matrix . I’ve not tried Matrix deeply myself. I like the focus on interoperability but have concerns about performance – it also doesn’t offer threads, of course. Perhaps some people here can speak to its benefits.

I’ve been told that threads are being worked on in Matrix, and that ‘associated replies’ (ie. a message that is indicated as a reply to another particular message) are already a thing.

[nagisa]

Ariel raised a good question of whether the logs are actually search-able and whether the search is more competent than GitHub’s.

I tried out the search functionality on Discord and it couldn’t find a message containing fooo when given a search query foo (i.e. a substring of the word I was looking for). It didn’t manage to find messages containing words with an edit distance of 1 from the search query in general.

[nikomatsakis]

I’ve used Discord’s search successfully a few times. Zulip’s search seems to work fairly well, but it also prefers whole word matches – although searching for region did match regions (but searching for regio matched neither). Misspellings do not work.

[nikomatsakis]

Having just come back from a week’s vacation, I can again attest that Zulip’s threads were invaluable. I was able to pretty easily catch up with NLL-related chats.

[nikomatsakis]

Hello everyone! So, for the last 4 meetings, the compiler team has been meeting on Zulip. I think it’s time for us to assess how well this has gone. There was also a proposal to consider meeting on Discord for the next 4 meetings and give that a try.

Thoughts?

[michaelwoerister]

I prefer Zulip over Discord. It seems easier to follow discussions there somehow and the interface looks less cluttered.

[rishig]

Hi everyone, Zulip developer here. I just wanted to chime in to say hi, offer support, answer any questions, and carry any feedback back to the team.

Some thoughts on the issues raised in this thread:

• Mobile: There’s still some ways to go, but we started allocating more of our time to it at the beginning of the summer, and the project is moving quickly. Many of the bugs from July have been fixed in the newest release (released yesterday/today).

• Terminal client: We have a new terminal client for Zulip: https://github.com/zulip/zulip-terminal. It’s still in alpha, but all the basic functionality is there and we’d love feedback from anyone using it.

• Moderation: Admins can delete messages, and ban (“deactivate”) users. We also have a “report spam” feature in the works, for auto-deactivation of users when an admin is not around. We don’t have one-on-one blocking/ignoring yet. There is some work done on it, and “individuals being able to ignore other individuals” is the next moderation feature on our list, after report spam.

• Search: We don’t match misspellings, but we do do stemming and possibly some synonym matching (though even if we do, nothing as extensive as say Google products). We’ve heard from many people that our search is better than Slack’s, at least. One nice thing about searching in Zulip is that you’re often just looking for a conversation, and as long as you match at least one message in the conversation you easily recover the whole thing, similar to searching email.

I’ll be checking this thread, but also feel free to find me on https://chat.zulip.org (Zulip community server) or at support@zulipchat.com at any time.

[nikomatsakis]

• Moderation: Admins can delete messages, and ban (“deactivate”) users. We also have a “report spam” feature in the works, for auto-deactivation of users when an admin is not around.

That’s great to hear. Moderation was one of my big concerns in adopting Zulip more broadly. It would definitely be good to have “one-on-one” blocking too.

[nikomatsakis]

One other question I had is if there is a recommended way to bridge between Discord/Zulip and IRC/Zulip? (Ideally preserving the username of the person speaking, at least if users are registered in both places.) Web searches turn up various projects, but it’s not clear if one is best.

[rishig]

We have had people successfully bridge IRC/Zulip, though I don’t remember if it was something they hacked together or something on our side (I’ll check and get back). I’m not aware of anyone bridging Discord and Zulip. The IRC bridge did not mirror users. So if I (rishig) sent a message in IRC, it would show up in Zulip as sent from the IRC bot, and the message body would just start “rishig: …”

The main issue with bridging though (and the reason we haven’t pursued it seriously) is that the Zulip conversation model and the IRC conversation model are kind of different. E.g. if someone replies to a message in IRC, it’s not clear how we would rethread that message in Zulip.

It’s worth noting that we do have proper bridging with both email and Zephyr; both are tools with a similar conversation model to Zulip. My guess is it would be possible to bridge with internals as well (at least on the Zulip side).

[nagisa]

Terminal client: We have a new terminal client for Zulip: https://github.com/zulip/zulip-terminal . It’s still in alpha, but all the basic functionality is there and we’d love feedback from anyone using it.

Awesome!

[rishig]

IRC bridge: We do support it, via bridging with Matrix.org.

We don’t advertise it since we haven’t finished the documentation for it yet, but it’s functional and we’re happy to work with anyone to get it set up.

I think it just posts every message from the IRC channel into a fixed topic in Zulip.

[nikomatsakis]

We discussed this also a bit over e-mail (in an effort by myself to get more feedback). The conclusion was to hold the meetings over Discord for the next two sessions (so Aug 30 and Sep 6). This way we can try both alternatives and have a fully informed discussion. Sounds good to me!

I’ve updated https://public.etherpad-mozilla.org/p/rust-compiler-meeting accordingly.

[petrochenkov]

September 6: Discord in the #compiler channel

The #compiler channel that’s under the LANG TEAM group? (Or I’m missing something?)