+1 on no mo' JS_THREADSAFE.
Also +1 on cutting the NSPR apron-strings. See
https://bugzilla.mozilla.org/show_bug.cgi?id=507718 --
almost-three-year-old patch from cjones, r=luke!
/be
Dave Mandelin wrote:
I was reviewing one of the River Trail patches today and I noticed that it had
to add JS_THREADSAFE everywhere. This seems wrong to me. IIRC, JS_THREADSAFE
originally was a build configuration parameter used to decide between:
- I want a multithreaded engine, at the cost of some locking
overhead for certain common operations, and
- I want a single-threaded only engine
AFAIK, that distinction is just about gone, so JS_THREADSAFE is now mostly
legacy cruft (the name certainly is), but has been pressed into service to
decide between:
- I want an engine that uses threads to make stuff faster, like
GC, compilation, and source compression, and
- I want an engine that doesn't use extra threads for that
Is this still a choice worth making? Most of our users have 2+ cores now, the
future is believed to be even more parallel, and everyone wants performance and
responsiveness.
How about we just say it's a library that uses threads, and give (preferably
runtime) options to control that usage in ways that people need? I think
requiring NSPR to build on Windows is the initial primary pain point. What's
the easiest way to hack the build system around this? NSPR is in a full
checkout, so it doesn't seem crazy to build NSPR and then SpiderMonkey.
It also occurs to me that SpiderMonkey's usage of threads is probably not
terribly complex, and people would probably prefer a C++ API. So maybe a small
threading library inside SpiderMonkey or mfbt is the thing to do. V8 has this,
maybe we can use their code.
Dave
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