thingsiplay ( @thingsiplay@beehaw.org ) 77•2 months agoAs a Thunderbird user and Rust fan, I approve this integration. However I want to mention that Thunderbird is good as it is and actually don’t think new features are needed. Only compatibility with other software or protocols could be better (which the Rust integration aims to improve). And to be honest, a way to disable some of the feature bloat would be preferable too, as I don’t use lot of the additional stuff (but I make use of the RSS Feed reader).
sunbeam60 ( @sunbeam60@lemmy.one ) 28•2 months agoJMAP support would make a huge difference to expand the only open/free (as in speech) competition Exchange has.
lemmyreader ( @lemmyreader@lemmy.ml ) English10•2 months agoAgreed. Self hosting email with JMAP support has become easier with Stalwart. More email clients with JMAP support would be nice.
sabreW4K3 ( @sabreW4K3@lazysoci.al ) 6•2 months agoWhat’s JMAP?
sunbeam60 ( @sunbeam60@lemmy.one ) 5•2 months ago sabreW4K3 ( @sabreW4K3@lazysoci.al ) 5•2 months agoI was reading that page and was just getting more and more confused and then eventually I realised it’s an alternative to IMAP. Pretty cool.
acockworkorange ( @acockworkorange@mander.xyz ) 2•2 months agoI didn’t know JMAP either. Apparently the authors found the complexity and stagnation of IMAP as well as inability to integrate with basic groupware such as CalDAV caused free e-mail clients to be dropped in favor of proprietary systems. Seems like a fair assessment and if JMAP solves that I’d be very pleased.
Slotos ( @Slotos@feddit.nl ) 3•2 months agoPlease correct me if I’m wrong, but doesn’t this allow one to represent virtually any resource as a mail inbox/outbox with access through a generic mail app?
I’m working with a specialized healthcare company right now, and this looks like a way to represent patient treatments data as an intuitive timeline of messages. With a local offline cache in case of outages. Security of local workstations is a weak point of course, but when is it not…
dragonfly4933 ( @dragonfly4933@lemmy.dbzer0.com ) English3•2 months agoYes, but that is always possible with most protocols, including imap.
Take a look a FUSE and you will see all the creative things people have done with filesystems. Or DNS, lots of fun things have been done with that also.
Ohh ( @Ohh@lemmy.ml ) 3•2 months agoThunderbird still uses mbox. Maildir is incomplete and experimental.
I really wish we could use maildir.
thingsiplay ( @thingsiplay@beehaw.org ) 2•2 months agoYes it was shocking to learn about the file format. I reverse engineered the stuff that I need to know and its a complex mess of noodle soup (later found a description of it, but its not fully documented by Mozilla either). I am surprised that Thunderbird still uses this ancient and inefficient format.
SuperFola ( @SuperFola@programming.dev ) English40•2 months agoI’m getting fed up about all those articles “rust x something: the future?”, “I rewrote in rust it’s now memory safe”. I get the rust safeties and all, but that doesn’t automatically make everything great, right ? You can still write shit code in any language that can RM -rf all your disk, or let security gaps here and there without intending to.
radiant_bloom ( @radiant_bloom@lemm.ee ) 23•2 months agoWho cares ? What matters is the features and how fast the app is. Not what language was used to achieve that.
mosiacmango ( @mosiacmango@lemm.ee ) 36•2 months agoRust 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:
Moreover, Rust has demonstrated superior performance compared to JavaScript add-ons, resulting in a quicker and more responsive Thunderbird. Furthermore, the integration of Rust into Thunderbird will be facilitated by the fact that it is already utilized in Firefox, enabling Thunderbird to leverage existing infrastructure for testing and continuous integration.
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.
eveninghere ( @eveninghere@beehaw.org ) 12•2 months agoNot the person you wrote to, but TB has native code in C++, so I don’t really think the speed will change. The official website also doesn’t advertise speed improvements. It argued that Rust is (almost) as fast as the current native C++ part in TB, and that’s about it.
thingsiplay ( @thingsiplay@beehaw.org ) 9•2 months agoI wrote a simple commandline program in Rust to read mailbox file from Thunderbird and to output count of unread mails. The speed is insanity! Measuring the execution time with command
time CMD
outputs execution time of total0m0,001s
! While also providing all the features and checks from Rust (plus Clippy with pedantic options enabled), so I am confident it is not a buggy mess. I would need at least 10 years of professional experience in C to have this feeling of confidence. radiant_bloom ( @radiant_bloom@lemm.ee ) 5•2 months agoThe 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…
Ropianos ( @Ropianos@feddit.de ) 8•2 months agoObviously 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.
LeFantome ( @LeFantome@programming.dev ) 7•2 months agoThis “skills issue” thing just sounds so stupid in my ears. I am sick of reading it.
So, I am choosing a language that I hope will ensure fast, secure, and sophisticated code for my project. It has to do this for code I write, my team writes, and all future maintainers and contributors will write as well. If I choose a language that makes it easy to write unstable, fragile, and insecure code then “the skills issue” applies more to my lack of capability as an architect than it does the coders that come after me.
Stop saying, “well ya, it is super easy to make these mistakes in this language but that would never happen if you are as awesome as I am” and thinking that sounds like an intelligent argument for your language choice. There are better options. Consider them.
radiant_bloom ( @radiant_bloom@lemm.ee ) 3•2 months agoWhy do you want sophisticated code ? That word seems out of place from the other two to me.
Rust doesn’t introduce the same problems as C, but it sure does introduce a lot of other problems in making code overly complicated. Lifetimes and async are both leaky abstractions (and don’t even work as advertised, as rust-cve recently demonstrated), macros can hide control flow…
C is unsafe, sure, but also doesn’t pretend to be safe. C is also stupid simple, and that’s a good thing : you can’t just slap ArcMutexes around, because by the time you know how to code them yourself you also know why you shouldn’t do that.
I hope Rust can reach a point where its safety model can be formally proven, and we have a formal specification and a stable ABI so we don’t have to hard-compile every crate into the binary.
But I personally expect something with some of Rust’s ideas, but cleaned up, to do that instead. Actually, I wouldn’t be surprised if C itself ends up absorbing some of Rust’s core ideas in an upcoming standard.
ReversalHatchery ( @ReversalHatchery@beehaw.org ) English1•2 months agoIsn’t rust-cve based on a single error of the borrow checker?
ReversalHatchery ( @ReversalHatchery@beehaw.org ) English5•2 months agoIt’s not “the segmentation fault thing”. It’s that C allows you to shoot yourself in the foot in many various ways, part of which will immediately show itself in the form of a segfault, part of which may show itself in the form of a segfault minutes, days, or years later depending on how the users use the software, and part of which will not show itself in the form of a segfault ever but make the program unstable in other ways.
Yeah, sure, you can say that it’s “a skill issue”, but maybe that’s not the attitude of the year if you want more contributors in the project, which is a useful goal if you don’t want it’s developer community to die out or otherwise disintegrate.
where people indirectly include 6,000 crates and
That’s why the maintainers shouldn’t allow anyone to just add any new dependencies without a proper consideration. I don’t think this is an unsolvable problem.
radiant_bloom ( @radiant_bloom@lemm.ee ) 1•2 months agoI admit to not knowing how running an open source project goes, but wanting more contributors seems like the wrong metric compared to better contributors.
I understand the pitfalls of C are not limited to segmentation faults, but I suspect it would be more productive to fix C by including some of Rust’s better ideas than to throw it away, as seems to be the current trend.
I don’t think Rust is wholly bad, to be clear, but it seems over-engineered to me, and the fact its useful new features don’t even completely work (see rust-cve) isn’t very encouraging.
I would recommend listening to Jonathan Blow’s opinion on Rust, which I tend to agree with. I personally think I’m just going to stick with C until Rust either becomes the standard, or I retire and let the next generation worry about that.
pingveno ( @pingveno@lemmy.ml ) English1•2 months agoincluding some of Rust’s better ideas than to throw it away
The problem is that you can’t just tack Rust’s ideas onto an existing language. Generics, traits, lifetimes, borrowing, sum types, and match are key Rust features, but took considerable design time before Rust even reached 1.0. They interlock to produce a pleasant development experience. You can’t just attached them to C and call it a day.
I don’t think Rust is wholly bad, to be clear, but it seems over-engineered to me, and the fact its useful new features don’t even completely work (see rust-cve) isn’t very encouraging.
Most of the CVE’s listed there are in unsafe code in the standard library. At some point, some code is going to have to have to implement the tricky cases. In C, this code is common place, ready for any coder to run into problems. In Rust, these are bizarre edge cases that most people would never trigger.
I haven’t heard Jonathan Blow’s take yet, but one thing a person pointed out is that he tends to prefer a style that uses a lot of shared state. Rust explicitly discourages that style, considering it a source of bugs.
I encourage you to give Rust a try. It never hurts to have another language in your arsenal. Who knows, you might even find it fun.
ReversalHatchery ( @ReversalHatchery@beehaw.org ) English1•2 months agoI don’t have much experience in C, but I’m not sure if bringing Rust’s ideas over to C would help.
As I understand, a lot of problems come from either that arrays are actually just pointers and if you don’t enforce it’s length for yourself then no one will, and in practice they span the entire area of process memory dorwards and backwards too. Or from that you free memory at the wrong time, or you never do that at all.
You can’t make mistakes with the first thing in Rust because the compiler takes note of the array’s length, and you just can’t abuse it as it won’t compile then. The second is a nonissue too, as memory management is automatic (kind of).Fixing C sounds to me like patching up a sieve. That language was designed with those features in mind that make it error prone, and changing them would result in a different language. You would have to change your program anyway, and that probably wouldn’t be a small renovation. Also, you often can’t afford to not use pointers, because that’s how you pass things by reference in C, and besides passing by reference being important for performance reasons (to avoid copies) that’s the only option if so you have is a pointer to something, and when it’s stored in the heap.
ProgrammingSocks ( @ProgrammingSocks@pawb.social ) 2•2 months agoI’m not sure I understand why people like Rust over C, although I don’t have that much experience in enterprise coding.
I’d actually say that Rust is more popular in open-source projects. The reason people like it is because it’s WAY safer than C or C++ while being literally just as fast if not faster. I’m still in the process of learning it though so I can’t speak to your other points.
It is worth mentioning that the White House recommends Rust over C/C++ due to its very notable safety advantage over classic languages.
ReversalHatchery ( @ReversalHatchery@beehaw.org ) English1•2 months agoSomehow it sounds quite weird that the white house has such a recommendation. NIST, or the NSA? That would be easier to understand because they deal with code and algorithms but the white house?
ProgrammingSocks ( @ProgrammingSocks@pawb.social ) 1•2 months agoI don’t know, I’m not american, I just read the news about it.
ReversalHatchery ( @ReversalHatchery@beehaw.org ) English1•2 months agoA few hours later I have read it too, possibly the same website. Still weird.
LeFantome ( @LeFantome@programming.dev ) 8•2 months agoWhy does every mention of Rust have to spawn these comments?
The story right after this one for me is how KeepassXC is porting to Qt6. I bet nobody has knee-jerk responded to that story bitching about the fact that they mentioned Qt. It is just the anti-Rust zealots that do this.
This article talks about the problems they were trying to solve, the tools they chose, and how those tools solve those problems. What is wrong with that?
Are you offering up informed commentary countering why you would have made different choices and why?
You do not need to attack every mention of a technology just because it threatens your historical preferences.
To be fair, Rust Evangelists are fucking annoying and it’s fun to hate them.
How do I know? Would you like to talk about lord and savior, Ferris?
sibachian ( @sibachian@lemmy.ml ) English4•2 months agopeople who like fast apps should care because like 99% of current software developers are building electron apps instead of giving us something that actually lets your high end computer behave like a high end computer.
the only modern chat application that doesn’t run electron today is Telegram.
the only cloud note taking app that doesn’t run electron is …uh. doesn’t even exist.
the only…
i can’t even think of something i use that was released after 2016 on my computer that doesn’t run at a crawl because of electron. fuck electron.
Aatube ( @Aatube@kbin.melroy.org ) 21•2 months agoIntegrate with GTK and Qt first
Aatube ( @Aatube@kbin.melroy.org ) 2•2 months agoBut I don’t use Adwaita. I use MATE Menta. Plus that doesn’t change to my desktop.
leopold ( @leopold@lemmy.kde.social ) English1•2 months agoThis would be a ludicrous time investment for very little gain.
Aatube ( @Aatube@kbin.melroy.org ) 2•2 months agoMaybe, but I find it kinda frustrating that they invested a lot of time in the direct opposite way. Thunderbird had Qt/GTK support in version 102. In the next release, they forced their own theme and moved some elements while removing Qt and GTK support with the nonsensical justification of “we’d have to hardcode every single possible color permutation that the user could theme” when you get the colors from a function. They then locked the threads about this. I assume they did some internal refactoring, but still, it feels frustrating.
(note that the new UI can be customizable to have the inbox be single-row and the mail content be on the bottom) (also 115 is 102’s next release, thunderbird updates the major version number to whatever firefox’s is at the time of release)
exanime ( @exanime@lemmy.today ) 14•2 months agoI honestly don’t understand the love for Thunderbird… Tried it for a few months, loved it entirely until I discovered it was fucking losing days worth of emails
Lost, as in, nowhere to be found, no search or manual browse would find them, no way of restoring them. Had to go into OWA to see the missing emails
Then apparently I found out it’s a known bug
I’m sorry but I would trade every bell and whistle for an email client that does not fucking lose your email
dino ( @dino@discuss.tchncs.de ) English2•2 months agoI mean we are using Exchange email accounts at work with thunderbird, would be really lol if emails just get “lost”. But yea for sure a problem of Thunderbird. No user nor microsoft problem… ;>
exanime ( @exanime@lemmy.today ) 2•2 months agoThe email was right in my inbox in owa… It could be an ms issue although I had seen the email in Thunderbird, that’s how I saw it first… Not sure how an email disappearing from my inbox is my fault
toothpaste_sandwich ( @toothpaste_sandwich@feddit.nl ) 2•2 months agoI wonder if that’s been fixed yet. You’d think so…
Possibly linux ( @possiblylinux127@lemmy.zip ) English14•2 months agoThunderbird is my kind of bird
efscher ( @efscher@lemmy.nyc.what.if.ua ) 10•2 months agoIn the meantime, Evolution has had EWS support for years… no Rust involved.
thingsiplay ( @thingsiplay@beehaw.org ) 6•2 months agoThunderbird had it as a plugin to support EWS.