I'm not sure if there are any remaining disputes about the Nitro ports to armv6 and armv7. But just to make sure everyone is on the same page, I would like to clarify a few things:
1) The armv7 port is separate from the armv6 work, and uses the thumb2 instruction set. Both ports are (I hope!) useful.
2) We would have liked to let the community know about the arm v7 port sooner. Unfortunately, we were not at liberty to disclose it until the iPhone 3G S announcement. We try to let the community know what we're up to and drop code into the public tree as soon as we can, but sometimes we are limited by confidentiality constraints.
3) We'd definitely like to have a port for pre-v7 ARM in the main WebKit tree. I think everyone made this clear.
4) I think it would be good to see if more code and ideas can be shared between the two ARM ports. They were made independently, and originally in different ways, so let's see what exchange can happen.
5) Gavin has been a strong proponent of using MacroAssembler as the primary CPU abstraction layer, and that approach has worked reasonably well so far. However, it seems at least to me that CPUs with very different instruction sets may want to do things differently at a higher level. x86 is a 2-operand instruction set with optional memory operands, and it seems to me a 3-operand load-store architecture might want to do things in a different way to get good performance. Making them go through a common assembler interface may not work. Ultimately, however, the proof is in the performance results. If doing things a different way delivers better performance, that is more important than maximizing code sharing or architectural purity. That has always been the WebKit way.
6) It seems like the intent with the Szeged arm port and the plan for getting it in the tree wasn't clear to all parties involved. For me personally, it wasn't clear that there was an intent to contribute it, or perhaps even an expectation that we'd just pick it up from the external repository where it was developed. Things would have been more clear if patches were submitted for review earlier.
7) It seems like people said some intemperate things during the earlier discussion. It also seems like these remarks were based partly on misunderstanding. I hope everyone has gotten past that, and that we are all ready to work together productively.
8) A number patches from the folks working at University of Szeged have been landed. But it seems to me like there has also been a fair amount of abandoned work and working at cross purposes. I feel like the people working on JavaScript at U of Szeged are not entirely in sync with the main JavaScriptCore hackers. You guys have done a lot of great work, and I'd like to explore what we can do to get more in sync on design direction. Does anyone have suggestions on this front?
I know that at at least some non-Apple developers have managed to do major work on JavaScriptCore internals (for example Cameron Zwarich before he became an Apple employee), so I am confident we can make things work better.
Regards, Maciej _______________________________________________ webkit-dev mailing list webkit-dev@lists.webkit.org http://lists.webkit.org/mailman/listinfo.cgi/webkit-dev
