On Mon, Jun 6, 2016 at 10:18 PM, Mike Hommey <m...@glandium.org> wrote:
> I'm going to sound negative, but why? Or more precisely, why not > contribute to DXR to add those features that you implemented in > searchfox that DXR doesn't have? > I started trying to contribute small changes to DXR, but I didn't like the design of the backend. At the time, DXR was switching from a SQL database to Elasticsearch. The idea of using a database or a big Java project to do something as simple as exact text matching and in-memory hashtable lookup (for C++ identifiers) seemed wrong to me. But I didn't think I could convince enough people working on DXR that I was right, so I forked it. Since then, I've made several other major backend changes: indexing is done mostly in Rust (for speed), and the whole thing runs in AWS (which means I'm not blocked on ops people to deploy new changes). I think those were both great decisions, but again, it would be a lot harder to do them in DXR. I've talked to Erik Rose and Peter Elmers about how we can merge the projects back together. They've started to port my JS analyzer to DXR, and I'm guessing that work like that will continue. I'm also hopeful that we can work together on some projects, like indexing other platforms. It doesn't seem to likely that we'll be able to fully merge the projects anytime soon, but I don't think there's any great need to do so. You can find the code for Searchfox at https://github.com/bill-mccloskey/mozsearch. I'm hoping to make it more friendly to contributions soon. It would be a great project to work on if you want to learn Rust or AWS or clang. That's why it's been fun for me. > MXR is already taking too long to fade out of existence, do we really > want yet another different tool? > I think all that matters is the pace of improvements to these tools. I think the existence of Searchfox will only speed this up. > > Mike > _______________________________________________ dev-platform mailing list dev-platform@lists.mozilla.org https://lists.mozilla.org/listinfo/dev-platform
