Thunderbird Making Progress With Adopting Rust Code

[User29]

The best idea would be to open a new project, like "myNewThunderbird" by Mozilla and start it over from scratch in whatever language they choose. Bloated, slow, ugly. I keep trying to connect it to the corporate exchange server from time to time but TB starts to eat up all the resources of my PC, randomly hangs, I can't type faster than 4-5sec/character, etc.

Once - just for fun - I've tried to connect neomutt to the corporate exchange and even neomutt took a deep breath and started to download that 100K+ emails and was quite responsive.

[billyswong]

Or maybe their true Netscape burden is the idea that Thunderbird must be founded on this firefoxy-electron abomination. For Atom/VSCode it makes some sense to allow for huge plug-ins that completely rewire most functionality, but TB is just an E-mail client that doesn't even have a web-only edition to share its code with. Also, Electron is a platform, which gives it some additional flux of attention, maybe TB should work on decoupling something similar instead of fighting with Outlook in the Microsoft-powered corporate spaces?

All proper mail clients must support HTML email. So you must embed a web browser engine in email software anyway. It makes sense for the world to keep at least one email client to be based on the web engine from Firefox. Monopoly of Chrome-based HTML handling is unsafe.

[Weasel]

Imagine if Wine project was rewritten to Rust.

Not gonna happen since it would be the end of it.

[darkonix]

If the whole code was something like:

unsafe {
call_c_function()
}

then there is little point in using Rust for this.

That depends on the context. For a full migration doesn't make sense. For creating a safe wrapper around existing code like a C library I assume is pretty common.

[DumbFsck]

The best idea would be to open a new project, like "myNewThunderbird" by Mozilla and start it over from scratch in whatever language they choose. Bloated, slow, ugly. I keep trying to connect it to the corporate exchange server from time to time but TB starts to eat up all the resources of my PC, randomly hangs, I can't type faster than 4-5sec/character, etc.

When they were talking about the challenges of "fixing" TB and released a blog or podcast 1+ year ago saying something like "to fix TB we are having to change the support structures of a multistory building without messing up the building itself" so I asked them about a rewrite.

Jason Evangelho assured me it was considered and judged to be even harder and slower, so they took it as "not feasible" at least for now.

I agree though, without being privy to their meetings on the topic (so to you and I) it really seems like at this point (or ar least at the "pre-supernova" point) it would be easier and better to rewrite it.

[User29]

When they were talking about the challenges of "fixing" TB and released a blog or podcast 1+ year ago saying something like "to fix TB we are having to change the support structures of a multistory building without messing up the building itself" so I asked them about a rewrite.

Jason Evangelho assured me it was considered and judged to be even harder and slower, so they took it as "not feasible" at least for now.

I agree though, without being privy to their meetings on the topic (so to you and I) it really seems like at this point (or ar least at the "pre-supernova" point) it would be easier and better to rewrite it.

I really hate making suggestions what someone should do with their time and money but TB is so utterly hopeless that it should be started from scratch throwing all the crap of the past ~20 years into the drains.

I'm not a pro developer but I could write my own toy pop3 client just for fun, so rewriting TB by pros just can't be such a big thing.

Or just simply forget it.