Re:Mozilla Wants To Split Off Its Thunderbird Email/Chat Client
by toyg on Tuesday December 01, 2015 @08:58AM
(#10655296)
Not sure if serious, but...
XUL (or rather XULRunner) is a cross-platform UI toolkit, basically a Javascript+XML runtime built with C++. It's what Mozilla programs are built with today, abstracting out a lot of OS-specific details. It's unlikely to ever be rewritten in any language, and pretty much failed to get any traction outside of the Mozilla ecosystem.
Re:Mozilla Wants To Split Off Its Thunderbird Email/Chat Client
by 72deluxe on Tuesday December 01, 2015 @08:49AM
(#10655239)
Why rewrite it in another language? It isn't currently broken.
Things that are not broken do not need rewriting.
Re:Mozilla Wants To Split Off Its Thunderbird Email/Chat Client
by acdha on Tuesday December 01, 2015 @10:10AM
(#10655836)
> Why rewrite it in another language? It isn't currently broken.
You need to support that claim. The people who actually work on Firefox have a list of reasons why they made this decision:
https://blog.mozilla.org/addons/2015/08/21/the-future-of-dev...
Why are we to believe that you are better qualified to make that call?
Re:Mozilla Wants To Split Off Its Thunderbird Email/Chat Client
by orik on Tuesday December 01, 2015 @08:56AM
(#10655279)
Maybe they decided there's too much technical debt and they can't make changes to the browser as fast as they wish they could in the current framework?
Not 'broken' in a traditional sense but still a valid reason to rewrite.
Re:Mozilla Wants To Split Off Its Thunderbird Email/Chat Client
by toyg on Tuesday December 01, 2015 @09:01AM
(#10655325)
Yeah, but there is a trade-off involved. If you spend 3 years rewriting your toolkit, then the time you will eventually save on further changes has to offset those 3 years, and that's very hard for most projects.
Ah yes, thank you for the reminder!
http://imgur.com/hLZp8SG
Now that I actually have a career and money I have no problem giving back. I'm glad I can donate to Ubuntu and Wikipedia nowadays. I am grateful for everything Firefox has given me for well over 10 years...
I really don't know what XUL is (intermediate language between HTML and FF UI?), but I guess I do feel sorry for people who have been using Thunderbird. I hope it's significant enough a property that people will want to continue, write it in Rust?