Comment by josephg

Yeah, I’m sure my Claude generated email client could be even faster if I wrote it by hand. Modern computers can retire billions of instructions per second per core. All operations that aren’t downloading or processing gigabytes of data should be instant on modern computers.

Claude’s toy email client gets closer to the speed limit than Gmail does. Why is Gmail so slow? I have no idea.

Look, it's an RSS reader, not a numeric solver for PDEs. What I clearly meant was: Every interaction is instant, no noticable delay at all, except the reader view, which makes a network request to an external site.

you have to ask it to profile and optimize the code for you. Then have it document the changes and run it in a loop. It’ll do wonders.

I asked a cursor agent to do the same for a geotiff to pmtiles converter. It managed to optimize the performance from tens of days to half a day for the case I wanted to solve.

Given parent and GP are both using Claude... have you tried Claude? (I say this as someone who has not tried Claude recently. I did try Claude Code when it first came out, though.)

> Rust is the final language.

> Defect free.

I am an upstream developer on the Rust Project (lang, library, cargo, others), and obviously a big fan of Rust. This kind of advocacy doesn't help us, and in fact makes our jobs harder, because for some people this kind of advocacy is their main experience of people they assume are representative of Rust. Please take it down a notch.

I think Rust is the best available language for many kinds of problems. Not yet all, but we're always improving it to try to work for more people. It gets better over time. I'd certainly never call it, or almost any other software, "defect free".

And I'd never call it "the final language"; we're building it to last the test of time, and we hope things like the edition system mean that the successor to Rust is a future version of Rust, but things can always change, and we're not the only source of great ideas.

If you genuinely care about Rust, please adjust your advocacy of Rust to avoid hurting Rust and generating negative perceptions of Rust.

> Beautiful to read.

Oh my, there's a new language called Rust? Didn't they know there already is one? The old one is so popular that I can't imagine the nicely readable one to gain any traction whatsoever (even if the old one is an assault on the senses).

> Rust is the final language.

I honestly can't tell if this is a humorous attack or not.

Poe's law is validated once again.

Sometimes I forget programming languages aren't a religion, and then I see someone post stuff like this. Programming languages really do inspire some of us to feel differently.

I would say it's overall the best existing language, probably due to learning from past mistakes. On the whole it wins via the pro/con sum. But ... Still loads of room for improvement! Far from a perfect lang; just edges out the existing alternatives by a bit.

I'd say that it's taking much needed steps to achieve perfection but many more steps are there ahead. The next language closer to perfection would definitely have a much gentler introduction curve, among other things.

Needs monads (not joking)

If AI gets sufficiently good what will be the point of rust? I can just whip out some C code, tell the AI to make it safe (or just ask it if the code contains any undefined behavior), done.

Working code talks.

Bullshit walks.

Why not go full functional programming at that point? If the main issue with FP has been accessibility, then it should really take off now.

[flagged]

Rust may be the darling of the moment, but Erlang is oft slept on.

As AI makes human-readable syntax less relevant, the Erlang/Elixir BEAM virtual machine is an ideal compilation target because its "let it crash" isolated process model provides system-level fault tolerance against AI logic errors, arguably more valuable than Rust’s strict memory safety.

The native Actor Model simplifies massive concurrency by eliminating shared state and the complex thread management. BEAM's hot code swapping capability also enables a continuous deployment where an AI can dynamically rewrite and inject optimized functions directly into live applications with zero downtime.

Imagine a future where an LLM is constantly monitoring server performance, profiling execution times, and dynamically rewriting sub-optimal functions in real-time. With Rust, every optimization requires a recompile and a deployment cycle that interrupts the system.

Finally, Erlang's functional immutability makes deterministic AI reasoning easier, while its built-in clustering replaces complex external infrastructure, making it a resilient platform suited for automated iteration.

Code is here: https://github.com/josephg/claude-mail

The JMAP client itself is hosted here: https://seph.au/claude-webmail/

I can't prove this but its a purely static web app. You need a jmap server to use it. If you use stalwart, set:

    server.listener.http.permissive-cors = true

or

    server.listener.https.permissive-cors = true

Then you should be able to put https://localhost:8080/ into the URL box. It should also work with fastmail, but I haven't tested it.

It made a webmail client. Not a jmap library.

Code is here: https://github.com/josephg/claude-mail

Live version: https://seph.au/claude-webmail/