From what I remember they were using GNOME for pop os with some custom addons they had made (for example a tiling addon). GNOME updates will sometimes break addons and I think the pop os people got tired of this.

That's barely a footnote compared to the development time that writing an entire DE requires, not to mention that now they can't piggyback off GNOME's development anymore and they'll have to do everything themselves. There's a reason Ubuntu eventually abandoned Unity and came crawling back to GNOME.

rust implies performance and security

Rust implies only 1 thing, and that's no memory leaks, assuming you don't use "unsafe" code. It's still very much vulnerable to logic bugs and has the same performance as c (GNOME) and c++ (KDE).

[–] stuner@lemmy.world 10 points 3 weeks ago (1 children)

Rust implies only 1 thing, and that’s no memory leaks, assuming you don’t use “unsafe” code. It’s still very much vulnerable to logic bugs and has the same performance as c (GNOME) and c++ (KDE).

Rust actually doesn't guarantee that there are no memory leaks. I think the more important memory safety improvements are regarding use after free, out-of-bounds accesses, null pointer issues, and double free problems.

[–] davidgro@lemmy.world 3 points 3 weeks ago

Perhaps leaks are easier to spot in Rust with how everything is tracked? I am just guessing.

I still assume you are right that it won't block compiling the way other memory issues would.

[–] khleedril@cyberplace.social 10 points 3 weeks ago

@imecth @stuner @littleomid @uthredii ``Rust implies only 1 thing, and that's no memory leaks, assuming you don't use "unsafe" code. It's still very much vulnerable to logic bugs and has the same performance as c (GNOME) and c++ (KDE).''

Not only memory leaks, multi-threading generally is hugely safer under the watchful eye of the compiler.

It performs slightly better than C or C++; the compiler is able to make better optimizations thanks to deeper insight into the nature of given code.