IainIreland

11 ms·

61.
by IainIreland 5y ago
One major benefit of compiling to bytecode first is that bytecode is a more convenient shared source of truth. For example, SpiderMonkey has two interpreter and two compiler tiers. The output of the parser is bytecode. We can interpret it i
62.
by IainIreland 6y ago
Assuming nothing's changed since I left, the front-end is taken from the old COBOL compiler, and is written in PL/X. It emits WCode for the backend, which is written in C++. XL C is a separate codebase, with very little shared cod
63.
by IainIreland 6y ago
We must have just missed each other. I started in January 2014.
64.
by IainIreland 6y ago
I worked on the IBM COBOL compiler in a past life. It's not LLVM based; the optimizer and code generator are derived from J9, the IBM JVM. I would be a bit surprised if they open-sourced it; OpenJ9 is open-sourced, but the COBOL compil
65.
by IainIreland 6y ago
One of the things I've realized after working on SpiderMonkey for a few years is that simple solutions that accept a little bit of overhead are often faster than more complicated approaches that try to eke out every last cycle. Math is
66.
by IainIreland 6y ago
(I work on SpiderMonkey.) Cranelift was originally started as a project to make a new backend for wasm in SpiderMonkey. It took on a life of its own, and has been transferred by the Bytecode Alliance (which Mozilla is a part of). At the mom
67.
by IainIreland 6y ago
In a past life I worked on a COBOL compiler for IBM. There is a COBOL specification, but AFAIK nobody actually implements it fully. Implementations pick and choose new features based on customer demand. Also, COBOL is dominated by large leg
68.
by IainIreland 6y ago
I believe this is the best account: https://yoric.github.io/post/why-did-mozilla-remove-xul-addo...
69.
by IainIreland 6y ago
(Mozilla employee, though not working directly on mobile) Mozilla is invested in Firefox on Android for the long haul. We landed a complete re-architecture this year (Fenix). It hasn't been completely painless -- for example, as you se
70.
by IainIreland 6y ago
You aren't allowed to goto a label in a different function. From the C standard: > The identifier in a goto statement shall name a label located somewhere in the enclosing function. `Shall` is a term of art here: > If a "sha
71.
by IainIreland 6y ago
The economy gets worse. Ad spending goes down. Google's search revenue decreases. Mozilla's search deal with Google is less profitable.
72.
by IainIreland 6y ago
The Mozilla Corporation is wholly owned by the Mozilla Foundation, a non-profit organization with the mission of making the internet a better place. Here's the manifesto: https://www.mozilla.org/en-US/about/ma
73.
by IainIreland 6y ago
> most of the recent improvements to Firefox were initially prototyped and developed in the experimental Servo engine which was to my knowledge intended to eventually replace all of gecko. Most of the team for that has been let go. This
74.
by IainIreland 6y ago
An opposing point of view, from somebody at Mozilla who cared about the browser and wrote the code: https://yoric.github.io/post/why-did-mozilla-remove-xul-addo...
75.
by IainIreland 6y ago
Mozilla employee here (albeit not on the mobile team): Relax, everybody. Fenix is a major rewrite. It takes time to reimplement all the WebExtension APIs. Nevertheless, the intent is to eventually add support for all the APIs that make sens
76.
by IainIreland 6y ago
The TC39 minutes are all online [1]. You can see the initial introduction of lookbehind assertions [2], the meeting where they reached stage 3 [3], a status update while waiting for more implementations [4], and then the eventual agreement
77.
by IainIreland 6y ago
tl;dr: The spec exists for the web; the web does not exists for the spec.
78.
by IainIreland 6y ago
> I have not confirmed this but I have been told the regexp portion is tightly controlled by Google, more than most parts of the spec. When v8's regexp implementation is found to deviate from the spec, the spec gets changed. This ma
79.
by IainIreland 6y ago
(Author here) I love Rust. I've lost track of the number of times I've stared at a chunk of C++ code, considered how much nicer it would look in Rust, and sighed. At the beginning of this project, we did consider whether it was th
80.
by IainIreland 7y ago
Last I heard, WebReplay was not on an official roadmap (in the sense that we do not yet have a target date for shipping it in release). That said, I'm pretty sure that the macOS-only restriction is just because that's what the pri
81.
by IainIreland 7y ago
Note that you can see exactly what is contained in the telemetry ping by going to about:telemetry.