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Thunderbird's New Rust Integration: The Future of Email Clients?
(debugpointnews.com)
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this post was submitted on 21 Apr 2024
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Who cares ? What matters is the features and how fast the app is. Not what language was used to achieve that.
Rust is wildly fast. Learning that it is being used for a program is good to know if you care about speed. If you read the article, it even addresses your exact critiques:
So not only with thunderbird be faster because Rust is faster than JavaScript, but it eliminates 3rd party addons by being native which also further increases speed. Lastly, development time for new features and improvements is faster because they can now use using the mature tooling that Mozilla has for Rust.
So yeah, good to know its using Rust now.
The improvement here is switching from interpreted to compiled. It could have been C, Zig, Odin, or even C++ (but thank Satan it isn’t C++)
I’m not sure I understand why people like Rust over C, although I don’t have that much experience in enterprise coding. I’m generally distrustful of languages without a standardized specification, and I don’t really like that Rust has been added to the Linux Kernel. Torvalds giving in to public opinion isn’t something I thought I’d live to see…
I get the segmentation fault thing, but to be blunt, that sounds like a skill issue more than an actual computer science problem.
Maybe if things were less rushed and quality control was regarded more highly, we wouldn’t have such insanities as an email client (or an anything client) written in JavaScript in the first place.
Rust is likely going to suffer the same problem as JS, where people indirectly include 6,000 crates and end up with 30 critical CVEs in their email client that they can’t even fix because the affected crate was abandoned 5 years ago…
Obviously it's a skill issue but don't you ever make mistakes? If Rust prevents some bugs and makes you more productive, what is not to like? It's a new language and takes time to learn but the benefits seem to outweigh the downsides now and certainly in the long run (compared to C at least).
Maybe Torvalds didn't give in to public opinion but made an informed choice?
The crates are a bit of a problem and I think Rust is a bit overhyped for high-level problems (it still requires manual memory management after all) but those are not principal roadblockers, especially in the kernel.
I do wonder why rust is used in high-level time to time, then I realize the most high-level langs are sht.