Taras’ Blog

LWN published an article about a tool that does refactoring of C code. Guess what, it’s yet another tool on top of a crappy C-parser that will never grok C well or even hope to support C++. To my great disappointment the author was not aware of my work on Pork. Clearly I have failed [...]

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 [...]

Often there are two ways to write code. One way is to design an API and have code patterns adhere to how the API is supposed to be used. Another way is to rely on language features to accomplish the same thing. Typically API-pattern approaches are chosen because compilers are too immature or just don’t [...]

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 previous post, I described the simple rewriting case that I am working on at the moment. Someone was quick to point out that the approach wouldn’t work for all methods (XPIDL Arrays were the example). Indeed, anything more complicated than simple getters can’t be rewritten to “Succeeded/Failed” pattern without switching to C++ exceptions. [...]

There will be a lot of under-the-hood code changes in Mozilla 2. Our goal is to end up with a simpler, safer and faster codebase. This is my perspective on the work ahead with respect to outparamdel. Outparamdel In the presence of a garbage collector we will be getting rid of stack nsCOMPtr<> usage (using [...]

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 [...]