What are your thoughts on the upcoming COSMIC DE?

DaisyLee@lemmy.ml to Linux@lemmy.ml – 3 points –

Basically title, with System76 moving from gnome to their new rust built COSMIC environment what are your thoughts?

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I'm incredibly interested in COSMIC DE! For multiple different reasons, actually.

  1. Rust - I'm very interested to see how performant/memory-efficient this DE will be compared with other DEs. Also, I wonder how the Iced toolkit will evolve and be adopted in other projects.
  2. Benefits over GNOME - I'm looking forward to seeing how much out-of-box customizability and features come with COSMIC over GNOME (which I'm currently using).
  3. Maintainability going forward - Since the DE basically started from scratch and is using a much better language for robust software, I wonder how much easier and faster it would be to maintain the desktop environment. This potential improved maintainability could be huge in overtaking other DEs sometime soon.

How is rust more memory efficient than c or c++?

It's not, perhaps they meant memory-safe?

The DE might be more memory efficient given the hindsight and freedom a fresh slate brings, but not strictly due to rust.

There's several things that make Rust more ideal for writing software that makes efficient use of resources than C or C++.

One of these is how cumbersome it is to use tagged unions in C/C++. They're integrated as a first class citizen in Rust in the form of enums, and both the standard library and all Rust projects as a whole utilize them extensively. An example would be the Cow<'a, T> type. The compiler also has some clever tricks like zero-sized types which can reduce the size of types which contain them.

On the surface, the borrowing and ownership model is useful for guaranteeing memory safety. Yet if you take that a step further, it's the perfect tool for finely optimizing resource usage with confidence. In comparison, defensive programming practices are the norm in C and C++ because resource management is risky. So applications written in Rust are more likely to be better optimized.

And the GNOME project doesn't just use C/C++ right? It uses Javascript for developing all sorts of components and Python for scripting/misc utilties. That's what I meant by more memory-efficient.