Comments on: Rewriting Tools for Mozilla 2: Moving Forward as Planned http://blog.mozilla.org/tglek/2007/10/12/rewriting-tools-for-mozilla-2-moving-forward-as-planned/ Taras' blog on Snappy, Startup, Telemetry and other Firefox peroformance matters Tue, 27 Nov 2012 16:50:13 +0000 hourly 1 http://wordpress.org/?v=3.5.1 By: Ira Baxter http://blog.mozilla.org/tglek/2007/10/12/rewriting-tools-for-mozilla-2-moving-forward-as-planned/comment-page-1/#comment-17566 Ira Baxter Sun, 15 Jun 2008 06:34:33 +0000 http://blog.mozilla.org/tglek/2007/10/12/rewriting-tools-for-mozilla-2-moving-forward-as-planned/#comment-17566 We have a C++ parser that was designed from the beginning to be a C++ source-to-source transformation tool. See http://www.semanticdesigns.com/Products/FrontEnds/CppFrontEnd.html.

This has been used to transform legacy C++ avionics code to change the underlying OS from a proprietary RTOS to Real Time CORBA.
There’s a paper at
http://www.semanticdesigns.com/Company/Publications/ that describes this experience.

]]> By: monk.e.boy http://blog.mozilla.org/tglek/2007/10/12/rewriting-tools-for-mozilla-2-moving-forward-as-planned/comment-page-1/#comment-4619 monk.e.boy Tue, 16 Oct 2007 09:37:26 +0000 http://blog.mozilla.org/tglek/2007/10/12/rewriting-tools-for-mozilla-2-moving-forward-as-planned/#comment-4619 @Arthur: I think the *entire world* will be interested in porting old c++ libraries to the new improved ones.

I think this tool is the start of a new era, never before have we had a wealth of good quality, open source code to re-use. A tool that helps de-cruft this code? God – it’s priceless.

monk.e.boy

]]> By: Arthur http://blog.mozilla.org/tglek/2007/10/12/rewriting-tools-for-mozilla-2-moving-forward-as-planned/comment-page-1/#comment-4613 Arthur Mon, 15 Oct 2007 17:42:58 +0000 http://blog.mozilla.org/tglek/2007/10/12/rewriting-tools-for-mozilla-2-moving-forward-as-planned/#comment-4613 Hm, I believe the OpenOffice.org codebase also contains a lot of legacy code which is there because C++ and its libraries didn’t offer all what they offer now. They’d probably be interested in such a framework.

]]> By: jmdesp http://blog.mozilla.org/tglek/2007/10/12/rewriting-tools-for-mozilla-2-moving-forward-as-planned/comment-page-1/#comment-4607 jmdesp Mon, 15 Oct 2007 11:15:26 +0000 http://blog.mozilla.org/tglek/2007/10/12/rewriting-tools-for-mozilla-2-moving-forward-as-planned/#comment-4607 @monk.e.boy : The benefit over textual, regex based, replacement is easy : As the tools *understands* what it’s doing, it will be able to handle zillions of /small/ variation that in the regex case every time require to you to add yet another special case, and if some case is really complex enough to break it, it will give you a syntax error instead of happily outputting garbage or worse creating code that compiles but will crash on execution.

]]> By: monk.e.boy http://blog.mozilla.org/tglek/2007/10/12/rewriting-tools-for-mozilla-2-moving-forward-as-planned/comment-page-1/#comment-4605 monk.e.boy Mon, 15 Oct 2007 10:19:09 +0000 http://blog.mozilla.org/tglek/2007/10/12/rewriting-tools-for-mozilla-2-moving-forward-as-planned/#comment-4605 Why do you have rel nofollow if you have spam detection?

I get no link love for my comment?

bah.

]]> By: monk.e.boy http://blog.mozilla.org/tglek/2007/10/12/rewriting-tools-for-mozilla-2-moving-forward-as-planned/comment-page-1/#comment-4604 monk.e.boy Mon, 15 Oct 2007 10:18:18 +0000 http://blog.mozilla.org/tglek/2007/10/12/rewriting-tools-for-mozilla-2-moving-forward-as-planned/#comment-4604 You should do a post showing how what you are doing is more beneficial than some Python + logic + regex search and replace :-)

I’d be *really* interested in the types of job you will automate.

Extremely interesting project though.

monk.e.boy

]]> By: Vijay http://blog.mozilla.org/tglek/2007/10/12/rewriting-tools-for-mozilla-2-moving-forward-as-planned/comment-page-1/#comment-4589 Vijay Sat, 13 Oct 2007 19:14:02 +0000 http://blog.mozilla.org/tglek/2007/10/12/rewriting-tools-for-mozilla-2-moving-forward-as-planned/#comment-4589 Hi

I normally follow closely on what happens at Mozilla. Normally i do not leave a comment. I just wanted to tell one thing. What you are doing if properly managed has great potential for Mozilla.

You are a Hero. Period.

Regards
Vijay

]]> By: fredrik http://blog.mozilla.org/tglek/2007/10/12/rewriting-tools-for-mozilla-2-moving-forward-as-planned/comment-page-1/#comment-4579 fredrik Sat, 13 Oct 2007 09:54:44 +0000 http://blog.mozilla.org/tglek/2007/10/12/rewriting-tools-for-mozilla-2-moving-forward-as-planned/#comment-4579 I’ve been poking around Elkhound and Elsa trying to learn how to write a parser using it. It’s fun, and occasionally “fun as in having a root canal”.

I’m working on a small Lua parser mostly to get my feet wet, but the ultimate goal is JavaScript. I’m no “l33t k0d3r” by far, but I’m a fast learner, heh. I have this thing where I want to build a successor to MXR/Bonsai, with multiple-VCS support (pluggable, essentially), syntax highlighting and semantic parsing.

One thing I noticed was that trying to clone either of the Elkhound and Elsa repositories from hg.m.o did not work. I had to download using one of the zip links to get all the files. Something seems weird in that regard. (“hg pull -r tip” after cloning basically says “you already have the tip” even though I don’t have all the files visible on hgweb.)

]]> By: Brendan Eich http://blog.mozilla.org/tglek/2007/10/12/rewriting-tools-for-mozilla-2-moving-forward-as-planned/comment-page-1/#comment-4575 Brendan Eich Sat, 13 Oct 2007 06:14:54 +0000 http://blog.mozilla.org/tglek/2007/10/12/rewriting-tools-for-mozilla-2-moving-forward-as-planned/#comment-4575 Robert: it’ll be QA’d by mozilla2 devs and (I hope this is coming on line soon) the usual (and growing over time) testing infrastructure, cloned from the CVS trunk: mochitest, reftest, the latest and greatest leak tests including sayrer’s brute-force leak detector, etc.

Then on to building the Mozilla 2 effort to include more and more of the community as 1.9 / Firefox 3 wraps up. After a few alphas, we’ll have shaken out any issues.

But I do not expect lurking badness in a generated patch, if the analysis that generated the patch is sound and valid. That analysis development is the real process to QA here.

So Taras has been focusing on tools in order to get Mozilla 2 to a smaller, faster, easier to hack codebase, and he and Benjamin are making builds that can be tested. Help welcome.

/be

]]> By: Robert Accettura http://blog.mozilla.org/tglek/2007/10/12/rewriting-tools-for-mozilla-2-moving-forward-as-planned/comment-page-1/#comment-4574 Robert Accettura Sat, 13 Oct 2007 04:53:10 +0000 http://blog.mozilla.org/tglek/2007/10/12/rewriting-tools-for-mozilla-2-moving-forward-as-planned/#comment-4574 How will this be QA’d for regressions, crashes, etc? Seems like it would be rather difficult to test all those parts of the code base in 1 patch.

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