All About Performance Taras' blog on Snappy, Startup, Telemetry and other Firefox peroformance matters

Open Source projects are often like parallel worlds. People reach the same conclusions, attempt similar solutions and are typically blissfully unaware of each other’s existance.

Here are two projects that came to my attention this week:

• Via Planet KDE I stumbled on Krazy. It’s neat if not somewhat depressing that even if C++ parsers are finally becoming accessible all this is still Perl.
• Helpful comment on my previous entry pointed me to dead method hunting in OpenOffice.

Uncool Open Source Rant

Reason I switched to linux was because it seemed like a developer’s dream come true. Compilers are a package manager operation away (and generally aren’t tied to OS versions, I’m looking at you Apple), everything can be recompiled to address any particular concerns and there are crapload of weird languages to write your software in. This is especially awesome when compared to a typical proprietory software stack where one can’t easily fix problems that involve multiple components due to licensing issues or due to not having the code available(or due to not having the development environment available). So one would think that Linux distributions hold the ultimate software power: unlimited pass to modify their offering to their target audience’s content.

Unfortunately my view of Linux ways is unrealistic. For example when people do friggin’ awesome work knocking down boot time to 5 seconds by hacking and slashing their way through the entire software stack involved in boottime delays, distributions claim that it’s not somethin they can seriously consider because they are too set in their ways of general purpose(and generally bloated) init systems and stock kernels(worst case: why can’t we recompile the kernel on the user’s machine or ship a couple of custom variations for common hardware out there). What’s the point of open source if we continue pretending that everything is a general purpose black box that doesn’t like to play together? It’s been two weeks and I haven’t seen a single distro bite the bullet and attempt to list 5 second boot in their goals. Come on guys, don’t you like to be challenged?

Hope someone proves me wrong.

In my quest to rid Firefox of code that doesn’t do anything it is possible to screw up and delete a method that is only used by outside code. So far, I’ve hit a component that isn’t used in Firefox, methods that aren’t used in Firefox and methods that claim someone is about to use them (with a timestamp from 8 years ago). That and I discovered some code only appears to be used from BeOS or OS/2 specific ifdefs.

Not surprisingly, I had someone comment that I do some “dangerous shit”. Sure, I can see why someone would think that.

My protection: I use the try server to make sure that everything builds on supported platforms. On top of that every patch gets reviewed.

Furthermore, I would like to point out that methods that aren’t called within Firefox are less likely to be tested and correct. So if one leaves code that should only be called from other projects, it’d be appropriate if we had some unit tests for it, which would flag the code as in-use. That would let us move to the next level and setup a tinderbox to detect dead code as soon as it is orphaned.