On 2016-05-12 9:53 AM, Nicolas B. Pierron wrote: > The more we empower people for working only on their domain(s) of > expertise, the less we would have need for such heroes. Having persons > responsible for the integration would help us on that.
As someone who has worked on many parts of the browser, I cannot disagree more. Bugs just don't tend to align themselves within someone's "domain expertise". I think of bugs which seem to only require me to only remember knowledge that I have accrued over the years as "easy bugs", and the more I learn about different parts of the browser, the more I come across issues that touch on the things that I have never learned about before, or things that I haven't learned well enough. Those I call "normal bugs". Also bugs are only one part of our work. I have found out that the more parts of the browser I have learned about, the more I have been able to work on "cross-functional" things that have benefited the browser as a whole, and nowadays these sorts of stuff are commonplace projects that we're working on. Take e10s as an example, that project doesn't map at all to any of the islands that we have created in our organization and/or code base. We need more and more people to be able and willing to step out of the little islands, as the whole world has grown much smaller now and the islands that maybe we created for good reasons back in the day are really just an artifact of the past. It's true that a successful project requires both specialists and generalists, and none of the above means that all people need to be generalists. It means that we need to see these little islands (SpiderMonkey included) as what they are, remnants of the past simple days where we'd get away with pretending to have we have a bunch of loosely integrated components that we could make a browser out of. (Anyone remember the pre-libxul days where we pretended to have "libraries" and whatnot? ;-) The current reality how web browsers are made don't afford us treating our codebase in that way any more. To me, discussions around unifying the coding style drill into the heart of this problem: we need to move on from having small compartments with people painting the walls to their heart's content, and treat the browser as the one unified beast that it truly is. Not because it matters how much whitespace we put where, but because a unified style paints the walls in a way that urges people to stop thinking in terms of small islands, and start thinking in terms of Firefox as a whole. My CDN$0.02 with respect, Ehsan _______________________________________________ dev-tech-js-engine-internals mailing list dev-tech-js-engine-internals@lists.mozilla.org https://lists.mozilla.org/listinfo/dev-tech-js-engine-internals
