Revitalising a 20+ year-old GTK mail client with Zig.
Talons[1] is my stripped down fork of claws-mail[2] which itself is a fork of Sylpheed[3].
Moving from auto tools to Zig’s build system was a huge quality of life improvement. Most of the work since has been deleting features and tidying up the code to make it easier to reason about. I realise there may not be that much value porting C to Zig the more I work on the project. Instead I see is there’s huge value in the usual stuff: clearly defined functions, preferring stack to heap allocation, minimising global state.
But it’s still quite early days. I’m looking forward to porting the trickier network code to Zig and using its built-in testing.
Moving from auto tools to Zig’s build system was a huge quality of life improvement. Most of the work since has been deleting features and tidying up the code to make it easier to reason about. I realise there may not be that much value porting C to Zig the more I work on the project. Instead I see is there’s huge value in the usual stuff: clearly defined functions, preferring stack to heap allocation, minimising global state.
But it’s still quite early days. I’m looking forward to porting the trickier network code to Zig and using its built-in testing.
[1]: https://git.olowe.co/?action=summary&path=talons
[2]: https://claws-mail.org
[3]: https://sylpheed.sraoss.jp/en/