The Abstract Wikipedia team is working toward a rewrite of our backend services in a different programming language, likely Rust. Node/JS has served us well, but we have run up against some [WebAssembly System Interface] limits that would be best dealt with by switching to a different ecosystem.
Somehow, it feels horrifying to use something that high-level for the backend, especially when MediaWiki has so much PHP and the WMF has so many PHP programmers. Maybe my adolescent arse is getting old…