PSA: message-parser project is frozen

[Simon-Laux]

This project is currently on hold, we didn't have the resources to maintain it and make it work well enough at this time.

Delta Chat desktop switched to linkfyjs and the message-parser never reached the other platforms.

We may revive it and/or take leanings from it in the future, but currently the project is not actively maintained.

I still believe in the idea of unified message parsing across all chatmail clients, but this attempt was not good enough.

• I think the biggest mistake was to wait for errors until the pop up to add them to our test-suite instead of porting tests over from existing test-suits.
• But also some parts of code structure and quality could be better, because the project was hard to understand for newcomers.

[farooqkz]

It is unfortunate to see all the effort go waste. But as the Persian proverb says "Whenever you stop the loss, it's beneficial". I don't know the initial story behind message parser. But using Rust for such a thing makes it hard for other people to contribute. Rust has got excellent features. But its learning curve also is so bad. Maybe it was a better idea to have this written in Go, if the initial idea was a unified parsing library for all platforms. Or some other language with better use of development time and better initial investment.

I think there is a chance such a thing can be used in future for some other Desktop DeltaChat client.