Taras’ Blog

Recently I dusted off outparamdel to see if I can get some refactorings landed. About a year ago, with the great QueryInterface outparamdelling experiment we ended up with a smaller binary footprint and tiny performance gain, but that never landed due to us not wanting to break compatability yet. Ever since, outparamdel has been patiently [...]

Looks like pork is slowly going to get merged back into oink. This makes me happy as it will result in decreased merging headaches and gives more visibility to my work outside of Mozilla. My elkhound changes are already in! Recently I added support for retaining gnu attributes to elsa and corresponding features dehydra and [...]

Typical It seems that there are 3 stages to doing a rewrite in Moz: Start a new tool. Make sure that it can rewrite some trivial testcases. Add lots of asserts for cases you are unsure about. Run tool on Mozilla and fix crashes caused by above asserts. Get 80% of the code rewriting correctly. [...]

My previous post on outparam rewriting described the wealth of functions that can be rewritten. Unfortunately, most functions in Mozilla are declared in XPIDL interfaces. I have been convinced that my plan to rewrite xpidlgen to avoid outparameters wont be possible because most XPIDLinterfaces can be implemented by JavaScript in a few different ways. That [...]

In the Beginning There Was a Void Approximately a year ago, Brendan discussed with me the crazy possibility of rewriting most of the Mozilla code automatically to modernize the codebase. The benefits were huge. Gecko would use the C++ standard library to improve code readability and reducing size, XPCOM would be ripped out of the [...]

This is an update on the ongoing deCOMtamination work from the automated rewriting perspective. I think it’s pretty exciting that Mozilla is the first large-scale C++ project to attempt automated large scale source code cleanups and optimizations. I think the tools are finally getting mature enough for the job. The downside is that there isn’t [...]

It doesn’t look like my oink patches are going to reach upstream anytime soon. In fact, in the past year no patches have landed in the oink tree. I think this is unfortunate, but I have my own repository at http://hg.mozilla.org and will continue working on my fork. So allow me to introduce Pork, the [...]

Will Rid Code of Outparams! I resumed my outparam rewriting work last week. Having fixed the CPP induced architectural limitation that I ran into, it was quite straight-forward to factor out squash’s rewriting code into a new tool. Unlike squash, outparamdel (creatively named new tool), can rewrite code precisely and reliably. I still don’t have [...]

Automated Analyses and Rewrites Dehydra and Squash are now mature enough to assist with mundane tasks like renames and various kinds of tedious code inspection. If you ever suspect that part of the Mozilla hacking you are doing could be done by a tool, contact me to see if I have a suitable tool for [...]

Squash If you are working on any C++ refactoring, especially if it involves function calls, spans multiple files or feels like you need a compiler in your head to help you, drop me a note to see if squash can help. Squash provides a great deal of control over the refactoring process because it is [...]