On 11/26/14 6:55 PM, Philip Chee wrote:
On 27/11/2014 00:03, Gregory Szorc wrote:
Yes, people on this list generally care about C++. However, there is
a very large group - most of the Firefox Team and a large amount of
Firefox OS developers - who don't. To them, C++, libxul, others libs
are 10+ minutes of CPU wall time before they can get to things they
care about (JS, CSS, XUL, etc).
If all you care about is JS/CSS/XUL/XBL then you only need to build once
with flat file format and then you can edit your JS/CSS/etc repeatedly
without having to do another build.
That only works:
* On platforms where we symlink (not Windows)
* With files that aren't preprocessed
It's a shortcut that does manage to work a lot. But it is dangerous to
rely on. It requires cognitive load to remember which files are or are
not preprocessed and thus when a build is needed. That's a dangerous
game to play and getting it wrong can result in minutes of "WTF I
changed the file why isn't it working." It also increases the barrier to
contribution because now new contributors must know what shortcuts to
employ to be productive.
We want these types of builds to be nearly instantaneous. You shouldn't
have to play guessing games and try to outsmart the build system.
It is reasonable to employ this shortcut because of existing limitations
in the build system. But I view this as a performance bug and a feature
that will be dropped once the build is nearly instantaneous. Enjoy it
while you still can :)
_______________________________________________
dev-platform mailing list
dev-platform@lists.mozilla.org
https://lists.mozilla.org/listinfo/dev-platform
