Followup: modularity, WebExtensions, and going faster

[David Teller]

My experience entirely confirms Benjamin's observation.

Simple bugs cannot be fixed easily because of gazillions of unexpected
dependencies. Adding features is a chore because it means that yet more
code will need to be supported forever due to yet further unexpected
dependencies. This is exactly the opposite of what we need if we wish to
recover our long-lost agility.

Moving extensions themselves to WebExtensions will help. Having clearer
boundaries inside our own code is critical, too. I do not know that
basing our boundaries on WebExtensions is the best way to enforce these
boundaries (and it's still not clear to me whether there would be
performance costs involved) but I haven't seen any better counter-proposal.

Orthogonally, static analysis (and other forms of automated code defect
detection) can also be very helpful there.

Cheers,
 David

On 10/10/16 12:54, Brunoais wrote:
> I agree with Benjamin here.
> 
> 
> On 10-10-2016 05:57, Benjamin Smedberg wrote:
>>
>>
>> On Fri, Oct 7, 2016 at 6:12 PM, Robert Helmer <rhelmer at mozilla.com
>> <mailto:rhelmer at mozilla.com>> wrote:
>>
>>
>>     I agree. I think our problem is that hacking on Firefox is
>>     exceptionally hard, and testing+shipping it is too. I don't think
>>     either of things are hard because there aren't good enough boundaries
>>     between different components.
>>
>>
>> This is where I think we (Robert and I) fundamentally disagree. I
>> believe that hacking on Firefox is exceptionally hard *because* there
>> aren't good boundaries. I think there's a lot to discuss about the
>> nature of those boundaries: JSMs versus WebExtensions versus future
>> Rust versus HTML iframes. But we just don't have effective boundaries
>> right now, and that is one of the reasons why hacking the Firefox
>> frontend is so difficult and exhausting.
>>
>> --BDS
>>
>>  
>>
>>
>> _______________________________________________
>> firefox-dev mailing list
>> firefox-dev at mozilla.org
>> https://mail.mozilla.org/listinfo/firefox-dev
> 
> 
> 
> _______________________________________________
> firefox-dev mailing list
> firefox-dev at mozilla.org
> https://mail.mozilla.org/listinfo/firefox-dev
>