Hi list,
I have been poking Gaia people around me. Here is a summary of what I
discuss with them, and where our concerns should focus to help them, as well
as any other application developer which want to target low-memory devices.
First of all, B2G is currently focused on the next release, which means that
for now they are stuck with Gecko 18, and today it is unthinkable to
back-port anything else than security fixes. Progressively the development
will switch to mozilla-central, and they will try to follow the train, as we
do. The version 1.2 of B2G is likely to be based on Gecko 27.
Gaia concerns are related to the memory retention of applications, and the
start-up time of applications, and transition time between application panels.
JavaScript does not have good memory model to prevent the retention of
memory, and soon they are likely to redesign some applications to let Gecko
manage the memory as they would like. The latest idea I heard was to use
iframe to reclaim DOM & JS memory when the iframe is no longer used.
For debugging, the JavaScript exceptions location seems to be their only way
to track down the source of the error. Currently, as they don't have a
remote debugger working well with multiple processes (they should have it in
a few weeks), they do not have any complain for us.
The worse is still for tracking memory issues. As memory is a concern for
Gaia, we should do some work to provide some memory inspection tool which
can find leaks and track changes of dependencies. One idea would be to do a
diff of graph, to track changes.
Another concern was related to the optimization of JS function, and to be
able to spew some information about compilation failures and recompilation
causes.
--
Nicolas B. Pierron
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