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Comment by southerntofu | Hacker News Reader

> Does the Linux ecosystem really need yet another desktop environment?

It depends. If you're talking about one written in C/C++ with JavaScript bindings, there's plenty of those already. And they all suffer the same memory/type bugs that make them unreliable and resource-intensive.

I'm not saying rust is a silver bullet, but in my experience the compiler is pretty good at preventing footguns, and the strong type system makes it easier to fork and extend than C-style "send raw bytes to this memory region and pray your gods" APIs. Overall i'm curious to see where this goes!

> hurting their own sales in the long term

I don't think people buy a laptop for a specific desktop environment. In any case, switching desktop environment / distro should take under an hour.

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I use a lot of different DEs because I'm a tinkerer, and I've never encountered a single memory bug in any DE I've ever used.

Gnome used to have a giant memory leak in its JS implementation [0]. It’s actually what caused me to go back to windows.

[0] https://phoronix.com/scan.php?page=news_item&px=GNOME-Shell-...

Memory leaks are not uncommon on GNOME, and i assume on other desktops as well. But Rust is not just good for preventing memory bugs: strong typing prevents lots of logic bugs as well.

Also, rust's "fearless refactoring" paradigm enables for incremental optimization which i've found much harder to deal with in other programming languages. I think that's a point worth considering for a big piece of engineering like a desktop environment.

EDIT: Also memory bugs are not just "memory leaks". There's plenty of subtle bugs introduced by off-by-one errors and undefined behavior. Just because memory usage doesn't rise unexpectedly doesn't mean software is working as intending. I don't know about you but i personally have had weird bugs with all desktops i've tried so far.

We all have heard the elevator pitch for Rust by now, since all it takes is for a submission to say "written in Rust" for it to appear on the front page of HN.

Do not worry. You will be assimilated.

> But Rust is not just good for preventing memory bugs: strong typing prevents lots of logic bugs as well.

Arc<> does exist though, and is used quite extensively in the rust ecosystem.

I personally never had problems with Arc<RwLock<T>>. The docs appear really clear about in what situations precisely it can be unsafe (if T is not Send+Sync): https://doc.rust-lang.org/std/sync/struct.Arc.html

Am i missing something?

Disclaimer: i'm not a good programmer, nor a low-level programmer; i use Rust as a faster/safer python-like high-level scripting language

Two examples searching for "memory leak" on DE bug trackers:

MATE: https://github.com/search?q=org%3Amate-desktop+%22memory+lea... (265 results)

KDE: https://bugs.kde.org/buglist.cgi?quicksearch=%22memory%20lea... (97 results)

That's just for the ones we found. I would be curious to run a full DE through valgrind :)

EDIT: Anecdotal datapoint ahead: i just had to kill atril (MATE PDF viewer) on a machine where it was eating 6GB RAM after running for a few days.

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