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Nylas Mail is now free

blog.nylas.com

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Re: Nylas Mail is now free

#321

Post by grinich »

torgoguys wrote: post #107
grinich wrote: post #21

Hey HN-- I'm the author of this post. Feel free to post questions! We are a very small team building this app. Hopefully you can focus on what's new/good and not what is left to do! :) If you find bugs, please post them here: https://github.com/nylas/n1/issues/

It looks nice. I don't have a mac so I can't test until you finish your release for the other platforms, but my question is about your marketing copy. I almost hate to badger you about this since the product looks nice, but I've got to ask about this line, "...the most powerful email client ever built"? That's a pretty bold claim and it makes my baloney detector go off. My suspicion is that it almost certainly isn't…

Nylas Mail is the first email client built from the ground-up to be extensible. It's kind of like emacs in that way– you can create new plugins that add any sort of new functionality, whether that means connecting it to GitHub, Quickbooks, your CRM, etc.

Re: Nylas Mail is now free

#322

Post by grinich »

Fnoord wrote: post #232
grinich wrote: post #21

Hey HN-- I'm the author of this post. Feel free to post questions! We are a very small team building this app. Hopefully you can focus on what's new/good and not what is left to do! :) If you find bugs, please post them here: https://github.com/nylas/n1/issues/

First of all thank you for making Nylas Mail, keeping it both free and open source. It takes courage to have such a free client competing with your commercial product. Also, thanks for developing the backend within Nylas Mail so a user can easily run the client without depending on a backend with SMTP/IMAP credentials hosted within the USA. Have you considered an iOS or Android version client? Why? Is the backend wit…

Yep, we've considered building an iOS and Android version. But that means we need to make more money and hire more people. Our team is very small right now.

The new sync engine is written in Javascript, which is faster than Python, but the main performance improvements came from changing the architecture.

Re: Nylas Mail is now free

#323

Post by Fnoord »

grinich wrote: post #322
Fnoord wrote: post #232

Earlier quoted context omitted.

First of all thank you for making Nylas Mail, keeping it both free and open source. It takes courage to have such a free client competing with your commercial product. Also, thanks for developing the backend within Nylas Mail so a user can easily run the client without depending on a backend with SMTP/IMAP credentials hosted within the USA. Have you considered an iOS or Android version client? Why? Is the backend wit…

Yep, we've considered building an iOS and Android version. But that means we need to make more money and hire more people. Our team is very small right now. The new sync engine is written in Javascript, which is faster than Python, but the main performance improvements came from changing the architecture.

Thanks for answering.

You could give the application away for free with a sub, while saying to Basic users they gotta pay for it.

The application Emby has the same model.

I think its fair. Me, I don't want more subs (and I'm not a business user so probably not your market). But I'm fine paying a (high) one time fee for an application.

Re: Nylas Mail is now free

#324

Post by cookiecaper »

scrollaway wrote: post #305
cookiecaper wrote: post #261

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It's different from using a C++ compiler to build a Qt application because it's in the opposite direction. Qt is a toolkit that lays on top of C++, which your compiler translates to machine code. Qt is still C++. Everything is the same language and gets compiled directly into the code that the machine knows how to execute. With JavaScript transpilers, this happens in reverse; there is an entirely separate secondary l…

It'd be easier to take your post seriously if you showed you knew enough about what you're talking about not to mistake Grumpy for a transpiler.

"Grumpy is a Python to Go source code transcompiler and runtime."

Literally the description on GitHub, and a very similar line is the first line in the README. I admit that I have not tried Grumpy personally and do not have any real experience with it. My knowledge on it mostly comes from the HN discussion a few weeks back. It is absolutely possible, even likely, that I'm getting things wrong here. Would you kindly correct my misconceptions? Thanks.

Re: Nylas Mail is now free

#325

Post by fuzzygroup »

I looked at this app in depth and used it for about 2 days. Overall it is fairly usable and I liked it but the memory usage is killer. On a MacBook Air with 8 gigs, it uses 979 megs out of the gate and bloats up an additional 100 megs by the next morning. More details here: http://fuzzyblog.io/blog/email/2017/01/18/nylas-mail-review....

Re: Nylas Mail is now free

#326

Post by grinich »

fuzzygroup wrote: post #325

I looked at this app in depth and used it for about 2 days. Overall it is fairly usable and I liked it but the memory usage is killer. On a MacBook Air with 8 gigs, it uses 979 megs out of the gate and bloats up an additional 100 megs by the next morning. More details here: http://fuzzyblog.io/blog/email/2017/01/18/nylas-mail-review....

Hey Scott-- how much of that usage was active memory vs cached/swapped?

Do you also run apps like Slack or Google Chrome? How does their memory usage compare?

Was this during initial sync (very resource intensive) or at a steady state?

(Thanks for the blog post btw!)

Re: Nylas Mail is now free

#327

Post by scrollaway »

cookiecaper wrote: post #324
scrollaway wrote: post #305

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It'd be easier to take your post seriously if you showed you knew enough about what you're talking about not to mistake Grumpy for a transpiler.

"Grumpy is a Python to Go source code transcompiler and runtime." Literally the description on GitHub, and a very similar line is the first line in the README. I admit that I have not tried Grumpy personally and do not have any real experience with it. My knowledge on it mostly comes from the HN discussion a few weeks back. It is absolutely possible, even likely, that I'm getting things wrong here. Would you kindly c…

Grumpy is a Python runtime. I don't know why they would call it a transpiler; maybe at some point in its lifetime that was the plan?

Re: Nylas Mail is now free

#328

Post by cookiecaper »

spion wrote: post #281
cookiecaper wrote: post #64

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I still do not understand the fascination with JavaScript. SPAs, desktop apps like Electron, server-side stuff with Node, I just don't get it. JavaScript is the worst tool for the vast majority of these things. It brings us enough pain as the only practical client-side language on the web. Who deals with that and says "I need to write my server (or worse, desktop app) in this, and you know what, I'm going to now bast…

"JavaScript is the worst tool". Ah, no matter how many times I see it, it never fails to rub me the wrong way for some reason. Its faster than Ruby, Python and PHP by a mile. It now has async/await. The amount of work that goes into making it good for front-end apps is amazing. It has a fairly large ecosystem. Dynamic / unityped nature lets you prototype quickly. Tooling such as TypeScript lets you switch to static t…

Thanks, this is the most convincing response so far.

In particular, I didn't realize how much faster V8 is than the reference implementations of similar languages. That can be a real and significant usage consideration and makes me less hostile to things like desktop apps. I've been operating from the "JS is slow" pre-V8 perspective, and while I knew V8 was a massive speed-up from the web perspective, I didn't consider that it was actually now among the fastest dynamic languages for non-web uses. That's a great point that should probably get promoted more often.

I still dislike a great deal about the methods and culture in the community and wish that such optimization would be directed at what, in my mind, is a more worthy target, but I know of a concrete rationale now. Thanks!

Re: Nylas Mail is now free

#329

Post by drdaeman »

dyu- wrote: post #296
yoasif_ wrote: post #289

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I remember a few years back after I got my first decent Android phone looking at "top 10" lists of the best apps out there. One of those apps was Lumosity, and I installed it. The first step was setting up an account. I promptly uninstalled the app, and to this day, I have no idea whether it is any good. It felt odd to me that for a game with no multiplayer component would require me to sign up for an account, and I'…

A non-main/throwaway mail for that purpose would be a good one for you to have so you can test without giving away anything.

And a throwaway phone without any user data? (I don't think there are working Android-in-Android VMs that are both performant enough and offer good isolation.)

Re: Nylas Mail is now free

#330

Post by cookiecaper »

scrollaway wrote: post #327
cookiecaper wrote: post #324

Earlier quoted context omitted.

"Grumpy is a Python to Go source code transcompiler and runtime." Literally the description on GitHub, and a very similar line is the first line in the README. I admit that I have not tried Grumpy personally and do not have any real experience with it. My knowledge on it mostly comes from the HN discussion a few weeks back. It is absolutely possible, even likely, that I'm getting things wrong here. Would you kindly c…

Grumpy is a Python runtime. I don't know why they would call it a transpiler; maybe at some point in its lifetime that was the plan?

My reading of the "Developing Grumpy" section of the README [0] is that Grumpy is primarily a transpiler, and that's what `grumpc` is. It says right there it takes your Python, compiles it to Go, and then you run `go build` to build a Go executable.

The "runtime" comes in at this point. It sounds like `grumpc` compiles Python objects down to stubbed-out Go objects, which depend on the functionality implemented in grumpy for the implementation of those stubs. "The Go code generated by grumpc performs operations on data structures that represent Python objects in running Grumpy programs."

To me, this mostly sounds like a Python->Go transpiler with special hooks to more easily facilitate Pythonic access in Go. If anything, it seems to support my original point that transpilers are custom-built even more; from my high-level and probably wrong reading, it looks like instead of a full-scale Python-to-Go transpiler, Grumpy's developer realized it would just be easier to implement if he made the programs dependent on his "runtime", which he could freely do because he was running his own project on it and he can execute that project through `grumpy` just as easily as he could through anything else. Such options would probably not be available to someone who was tasked with writing a generic Python-to-Go transpiler that was expected to work anywhere that Go works.

I also could be misreading this, because again, I've never used it, and maybe by "runtime" the author really does just mean "library", and it all compiles down to a standard Go application. That'd be cool.

[0] https://github.com/google/grumpy/tree/aa58aa68717f6ac2ebf40f...

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