Re:Ask HN: Which abandoned proprietary software would you re...
by jcranmer on Saturday December 08, 2018 @09:34PM
(#18638892)
> As for email clients, I do keep wondering how Thunderbird can be so slow, how its rendering system can be so shite.
It's effectively single-threaded, with all the I/O running on the same thread as the GUI (oh import is so fun). And you need to load the entire metadata database for a folder into memory at once.
I have looked into fixing it before, but it does require redoing pretty much the entire API, which means its several man-years of developer work. And Mozilla has never invested enough in Thunderbird to let that sort of work get done.
It's effectively single-threaded, with all the I/O running on the same thread as the GUI (oh import is so fun). And you need to load the entire metadata database for a folder into memory at once.
I have looked into fixing it before, but it does require redoing pretty much the entire API, which means its several man-years of developer work. And Mozilla has never invested enough in Thunderbird to let that sort of work get done.