Thunderbird Making Progress With Adopting Rust Code

Earlier this month at FOSDEM in Brussels was a presentation by developers Brendan Abolivier, Ikey Doherty, and Sean Burke on the Thunderbird mail client beginning to make use of the Rust programming language within its codebase.

Thunderbird developers are looking at using rust within the mail client much for the same reasons as the Servo web engine and growing number of other open-source projects do: memory safety provided by the language, performance, and the modularity and ecosystem of Rust and Cargo.

Thunderbird developers have been using Rust for overhauling the mail client's Microsoft Exchange support. Rust is proving useful for replacing a lot of old, unmaintained code within Thunderbird. The hope is that with the Rust transition they'll be replacing a lot of old and delicate code paths and improving the overall architecture.

Those wanting to learn more about Thunderbird beginning to gradually adopt the Rust programming language can find the FOSDEM 2024 presentation slides and video recording via FOSDEM.org.