Re: The worst piece of Mozilla code
On 17/10/2014 00:32, Nicholas Nethercote wrote: Thanks for the replies so far! I deliberately left this question vague to see what kind of responses people would give. But mostly I'm interested in code whose awfulness impacts users in a serious way. Ones where refactoring/rewriting efforts would be valuable. That excludes code that no longer exists :) A lot of early FxOS code both in gecko and gaia was hacked together in no time during caffeine-fueled work weeks by jet-lagged developers. Some of it was cleaned up but some is still with us, mostly in gaia I'd say, where it often does have an impact on end users. A few things that come to mind: - In some applications transitions between a panel or a similar UI state are not atomic so if you tap fast enough funny things happen. - We often store application data in the DOM again making for funny bugs when we update the DOM asynchronously while the user is interacting with the application. - I'm not really sure all of our IndexedDB uses are doing transactions properly. We had (and possibly still have) multiple places where we were doing things that should have been atomic in different transactions (because of async_storage.js for example) and we assumed that a transaction succeeded if the last request succeeded (but not the transaction itself). - Dual-SIM support is still partially done. Some things work, some things kinda work, some things don't work at all (e.g. use SIMs from two different countries and only the first one's country prefix will be recognized correctly when matching numbers). - Last but not least issues in horribly buggy Android binary blobs were worked around in gecko, some of those workarounds ended up being duplicated in different pieces of code as refactorings came and went, e.g.: http://dxr.mozilla.org/mozilla-central/source/gfx/layers/RotatedBuffer.cpp#403 http://dxr.mozilla.org/mozilla-central/source/gfx/layers/client/TextureClient.cpp#226 I know we blacklist drivers on desktops too; what makes this worse is that we can't ask users to update their drivers on their phones and these horrors keep creeping into our codebase and we don't know when we'll be able to get rid of them (or if we'll remember all the places we put them in). Gabriele signature.asc Description: OpenPGP digital signature ___ dev-platform mailing list dev-platform@lists.mozilla.org https://lists.mozilla.org/listinfo/dev-platform
Re: The worst piece of Mozilla code
Hi, this mail made me laugh, because I can tell very similar stories with different examples. (Not sure if :) or :( ) On the positive side, I think we got a lot better since then by both, fixing broken designs and code, and also applying learned lessons to new sub-systems. Best regards Thomas Am 20.10.2014 12:54, schrieb Gabriele Svelto: On 17/10/2014 00:32, Nicholas Nethercote wrote: Thanks for the replies so far! I deliberately left this question vague to see what kind of responses people would give. But mostly I'm interested in code whose awfulness impacts users in a serious way. Ones where refactoring/rewriting efforts would be valuable. That excludes code that no longer exists :) A lot of early FxOS code both in gecko and gaia was hacked together in no time during caffeine-fueled work weeks by jet-lagged developers. Some of it was cleaned up but some is still with us, mostly in gaia I'd say, where it often does have an impact on end users. A few things that come to mind: - In some applications transitions between a panel or a similar UI state are not atomic so if you tap fast enough funny things happen. - We often store application data in the DOM again making for funny bugs when we update the DOM asynchronously while the user is interacting with the application. - I'm not really sure all of our IndexedDB uses are doing transactions properly. We had (and possibly still have) multiple places where we were doing things that should have been atomic in different transactions (because of async_storage.js for example) and we assumed that a transaction succeeded if the last request succeeded (but not the transaction itself). - Dual-SIM support is still partially done. Some things work, some things kinda work, some things don't work at all (e.g. use SIMs from two different countries and only the first one's country prefix will be recognized correctly when matching numbers). - Last but not least issues in horribly buggy Android binary blobs were worked around in gecko, some of those workarounds ended up being duplicated in different pieces of code as refactorings came and went, e.g.: http://dxr.mozilla.org/mozilla-central/source/gfx/layers/RotatedBuffer.cpp#403 http://dxr.mozilla.org/mozilla-central/source/gfx/layers/client/TextureClient.cpp#226 I know we blacklist drivers on desktops too; what makes this worse is that we can't ask users to update their drivers on their phones and these horrors keep creeping into our codebase and we don't know when we'll be able to get rid of them (or if we'll remember all the places we put them in). Gabriele ___ dev-platform mailing list dev-platform@lists.mozilla.org https://lists.mozilla.org/listinfo/dev-platform ___ dev-platform mailing list dev-platform@lists.mozilla.org https://lists.mozilla.org/listinfo/dev-platform
Re: The worst piece of Mozilla code
On Fri, Oct 17, 2014 at 1:32 AM, Nicholas Nethercote n.netherc...@gmail.com wrote: On Thu, Oct 16, 2014 at 11:32 PM, Nicholas Nethercote n.netherc...@gmail.com wrote: I was wondering what people think is the worst piece of code in the entire Mozilla codebase. I'll leave the exact meanings of worst and piece of code unspecified... Thanks for the replies so far! I deliberately left this question vague to see what kind of responses people would give. But mostly I'm interested in code whose awfulness impacts users in a serious way. Well, most of the time the user-facing correctness problems are not serious, but nsDocLoader::mIsLoadingDocument is very bogus, causes correctness problems and has consequences that include us still having the ghost of the old HTML parser around for about:blank. (nsDocLoader in general isn't nice code.) -- Henri Sivonen hsivo...@hsivonen.fi https://hsivonen.fi/ ___ dev-platform mailing list dev-platform@lists.mozilla.org https://lists.mozilla.org/listinfo/dev-platform
Re: The worst piece of Mozilla code
Thank you Bobby and Josh for all your work to improve ImageLib! I’m pushing hard on making it better still (with a lot of help from folks like Timothy Nikkel and Michael Wu). Hopefully next time we try to decide what the worst piece of Mozilla code is, ImageLib won’t be a candidate. =) - Seth On Oct 17, 2014, at 12:25 AM, Bobby Holley bobbyhol...@gmail.com wrote: On Fri, Oct 17, 2014 at 1:03 AM, Josh Matthews j...@joshmatthews.net wrote: I'm not certain that the image/src/ code is as bad as you make out any more. bholley certainly is no longer the expert there; I took over a bunch of his work to clean it up a year or two ago, and Seth is the benevolent dictator now and has done some good cleanup work on it as well. Yes, I stepped down as an ImageLib peer a little under three years ago. And when comparing the initial states of ImageLib and XPConnect when I inherited them, ImageLib was a dream to work with. ;-) ___ dev-platform mailing list dev-platform@lists.mozilla.org https://lists.mozilla.org/listinfo/dev-platform ___ dev-platform mailing list dev-platform@lists.mozilla.org https://lists.mozilla.org/listinfo/dev-platform
Re: The worst piece of Mozilla code
Nicholas Nethercote wrote: I was wondering what people think is the worst piece of code in the entire Mozilla codebase. I'll leave the exact meanings of worst and piece of code unspecified... When you get time, find someone to tell you about Morse code. (No, I don't mean Samuel.) -- Warning: May contain traces of nuts. ___ dev-platform mailing list dev-platform@lists.mozilla.org https://lists.mozilla.org/listinfo/dev-platform
Re: The worst piece of Mozilla code
Ehsan Akhgari wrote: Speaking about code that causes correctness bugs that actually affect our end users, the best example that I know is editor/. Not just correctness, but the unique way it use pointers to nsCOMPtr all over... -- Warning: May contain traces of nuts. ___ dev-platform mailing list dev-platform@lists.mozilla.org https://lists.mozilla.org/listinfo/dev-platform
Re: The worst piece of Mozilla code
Mike Hoye wrote: I mean, if you find somebody in their office today curled up in a ball, rocking back and forth and muttering mork, mork, mork over and over again, that person's having a bad flashback. Call for help, stay with them. Tell them we've got sqlite now and it's going to be OK. Those are different use cases; mork did synchronous C++ arbitrary key value store very well 15 years ago, as long as you were prepared to flush the file on the main thread. (I guess OS.writeAtomic and JSON get you there for JS these days.) -- Warning: May contain traces of nuts. ___ dev-platform mailing list dev-platform@lists.mozilla.org https://lists.mozilla.org/listinfo/dev-platform
Re: The worst piece of Mozilla code
On Thu 16 Oct 2014 14:32, Nicholas Nethercote n.netherc...@gmail.com writes: I was wondering what people think is the worst piece of code in the entire Mozilla codebase. I'll leave the exact meanings of worst and piece of code unspecified... The LegacyCompExprTransplanter. https://hg.mozilla.org/integration/mozilla-inbound/file/ce796ac8901b/js/src/frontend/Parser.cpp#l6110 ___ dev-platform mailing list dev-platform@lists.mozilla.org https://lists.mozilla.org/listinfo/dev-platform
Re: The worst piece of Mozilla code
On 10/16/2014 02:32 PM, Nicholas Nethercote wrote: I was wondering what people think is the worst piece of code in the entire Mozilla codebase. I'll leave the exact meanings of worst and piece of code unspecified... Simple, any file named configure.in in the code base, because deprecated tools, and because this is the thing that I always have to run when a build-directory. “configure does not scale—never!—” [1] [1] http://hubble.gforge.inria.fr/parallel-builds.html -- Nicolas B. Pierron ___ dev-platform mailing list dev-platform@lists.mozilla.org https://lists.mozilla.org/listinfo/dev-platform
Re: The worst piece of Mozilla code
On 2014-10-16 8:32 AM, Nicholas Nethercote wrote: Hi, I was wondering what people think is the worst piece of code in the entire Mozilla codebase. I'll leave the exact meanings of worst and piece of code unspecified... Currently or ever? I mean, if you find somebody in their office today curled up in a ball, rocking back and forth and muttering mork, mork, mork over and over again, that person's having a bad flashback. Call for help, stay with them. Tell them we've got sqlite now and it's going to be OK. Don't mention Thunderbird. - mhoye ___ dev-platform mailing list dev-platform@lists.mozilla.org https://lists.mozilla.org/listinfo/dev-platform
Re: The worst piece of Mozilla code
On 10/16/2014 03:08 PM, Nicolas B. Pierron wrote: On 10/16/2014 02:32 PM, Nicholas Nethercote wrote: I was wondering what people think is the worst piece of code in the entire Mozilla codebase. I'll leave the exact meanings of worst and piece of code unspecified... Simple, any file named configure.in in the code base, because (1) deprecated tools, and because this is the thing that I always have to run when a (2) build-directory. (1) we use deprecated tools (2) always have to run it when we make a new build-directory. “configure does not scale—never!—” [1] [1] http://hubble.gforge.inria.fr/parallel-builds.html -- Nicolas B. Pierron One day I would have to figure out why thunderbird crash when it fails to save drafts of mailing list replies. ___ dev-platform mailing list dev-platform@lists.mozilla.org https://lists.mozilla.org/listinfo/dev-platform
Re: The worst piece of Mozilla code
On 10/16/2014 7:32 AM, Nicholas Nethercote wrote: Hi, I was wondering what people think is the worst piece of code in the entire Mozilla codebase. I'll leave the exact meanings of worst and piece of code unspecified... http://dxr.mozilla.org/comm-central/source/mailnews/mime/src/mimedrft.cpp. C code masquerading as C++ that use XPCOM classes directly. Manual memory allocation up the wazoo. Cleans temporary files on error but not success. -- Joshua Cranmer Thunderbird and DXR developer Source code archæologist ___ dev-platform mailing list dev-platform@lists.mozilla.org https://lists.mozilla.org/listinfo/dev-platform
Re: The worst piece of Mozilla code
On Thu 16 Oct 2014 15:24, Joshua Cranmer pidgeo...@gmail.com writes: http://dxr.mozilla.org/comm-central/source/mailnews/mime/src/mimedrft.cpp. C code masquerading as C++ that use XPCOM classes directly. Manual memory allocation up the wazoo. Cleans temporary files on error but not success. Hahaha CreateCompositionFields has 15 char* arguments, one after the other, and one of them isn't const. Good times :) Andy ___ dev-platform mailing list dev-platform@lists.mozilla.org https://lists.mozilla.org/listinfo/dev-platform
Re: The worst piece of Mozilla code
On Fri, Oct 17, 2014 at 1:32 AM, Nicholas Nethercote n.netherc...@gmail.com wrote: I was wondering what people think is the worst piece of code in the entire Mozilla codebase. I'll leave the exact meanings of worst and piece of code unspecified... Probably not the worst, but always deserves a mention: http://dxr.mozilla.org/mozilla-central/source/layout/xul/nsSprocketLayout.cpp#632 // That's it! If you made it this far without having a nervous breakdown, // congratulations! Go get yourself a beer. ... which ties into the XUL thread :-) Rob -- oIo otoeololo oyooouo otohoaoto oaonoyooonoeo owohooo oioso oaonogoroyo owoiotoho oao oboroootohoeoro oooro osoiosotoeoro owoiololo oboeo osouobojoeocoto otooo ojouodogomoeonoto.o oAogoaoiono,o oaonoyooonoeo owohooo osoaoyoso otooo oao oboroootohoeoro oooro osoiosotoeoro,o o‘oRoaocoao,o’o oioso oaonosowoeoroaoboloeo otooo otohoeo ocooouoroto.o oAonodo oaonoyooonoeo owohooo osoaoyoso,o o‘oYooouo ofolo!o’o owoiololo oboeo oiono odoaonogoeoro ooofo otohoeo ofoioroeo ooofo ohoeololo. ___ dev-platform mailing list dev-platform@lists.mozilla.org https://lists.mozilla.org/listinfo/dev-platform
Re: The worst piece of Mozilla code
only code? Long time ago I found a PSD file in the Netscape source. About 1MB with a few layers. m On Thu, Oct 16, 2014 at 4:52 PM, Robert O'Callahan rob...@ocallahan.org wrote: On Fri, Oct 17, 2014 at 1:32 AM, Nicholas Nethercote n.netherc...@gmail.com wrote: I was wondering what people think is the worst piece of code in the entire Mozilla codebase. I'll leave the exact meanings of worst and piece of code unspecified... Probably not the worst, but always deserves a mention: http://dxr.mozilla.org/mozilla-central/source/layout/xul/nsSprocketLayout.cpp#632 // That's it! If you made it this far without having a nervous breakdown, // congratulations! Go get yourself a beer. ... which ties into the XUL thread :-) Rob -- oIo otoeololo oyooouo otohoaoto oaonoyooonoeo owohooo oioso oaonogoroyo owoiotoho oao oboroootohoeoro oooro osoiosotoeoro owoiololo oboeo osouobojoeocoto otooo ojouodogomoeonoto.o oAogoaoiono,o oaonoyooonoeo owohooo osoaoyoso otooo oao oboroootohoeoro oooro osoiosotoeoro,o o‘oRoaocoao,o’o oioso oaonosowoeoroaoboloeo otooo otohoeo ocooouoroto.o oAonodo oaonoyooonoeo owohooo osoaoyoso,o o‘oYooouo ofolo!o’o owoiololo oboeo oiono odoaonogoeoro ooofo otohoeo ofoioroeo ooofo ohoeololo. ___ dev-platform mailing list dev-platform@lists.mozilla.org https://lists.mozilla.org/listinfo/dev-platform -- www.telasocial.com ___ dev-platform mailing list dev-platform@lists.mozilla.org https://lists.mozilla.org/listinfo/dev-platform
Re: The worst piece of Mozilla code
On 10/16/14 5:32 AM, Nicholas Nethercote wrote: I was wondering what people think is the worst piece of code in the entire Mozilla codebase. I'll leave the exact meanings of worst and piece of code unspecified... It's gone now, but I always held a special hate for nsIDialogParamBlock. http://mxr.mozilla.org/seamonkey/source/embedding/components/windowwatcher/public/nsIDialogParamBlock.idl It was a horrid XPCOM thing to pass strings around for creating a prompt, by way of magic numbers. Want to set the title? Set string #12! Or maybe it was #3. They're listed in the completely separate nsPIPromptService.idl, but they're confusing (#12 is eDialogTitle, #3 is eTitleMessage), and IIRC some are complete lies. Most of the other original prompting code was similarly bad. Justin ___ dev-platform mailing list dev-platform@lists.mozilla.org https://lists.mozilla.org/listinfo/dev-platform
Re: The worst piece of Mozilla code
roc said: Probably not the worst, but always deserves a mention: http://dxr.mozilla.org/mozilla-central/source/layout/xul/nsSprocketLayout.cpp#632 That's relatively short. This is 800 lines, complete with several layers of goto: http://dxr.mozilla.org/mozilla-central/source/security/nss/lib/ssl/ssl3con.c?from=ssl3_HandleClientHellocase=true#7618 ___ dev-platform mailing list dev-platform@lists.mozilla.org https://lists.mozilla.org/listinfo/dev-platform
Re: The worst piece of Mozilla code
On Fri, Oct 17, 2014 at 1:32 AM, Nicholas Nethercote n.netherc...@gmail.com wrote: I was wondering what people think is the worst piece of code in the entire Mozilla codebase. I'll leave the exact meanings of worst and piece of code unspecified... Probably not the worst, but always deserves a mention: http://dxr.mozilla.org/mozilla-central/source/layout/xul/nsSprocketLayout.cpp#632 // That's it! If you made it this far without having a nervous // breakdown, congratulations! Go get yourself a beer. ... which ties into the XUL thread :-) Reminds me of the total rewrite I did of the table-layout code for SpyGlass eons ago, to actually work correctly (I think I even had it handle bug 10212 correct - height 100% when nesting tables). Quite brain-warping, especially how changes can ripple through multiple times. -- Randell Jesup, Mozilla Corp remove news for personal email ___ dev-platform mailing list dev-platform@lists.mozilla.org https://lists.mozilla.org/listinfo/dev-platform
Re: The worst piece of Mozilla code
On Thursday 2014-10-16 05:32 -0700, Nicholas Nethercote wrote: I was wondering what people think is the worst piece of code in the entire Mozilla codebase. I'll leave the exact meanings of worst and piece of code unspecified... I'd probably pick the table and row height computation code in the table layout code. There's row height code in nsTableRowGroupFrame::ReflowChildren, nsTableRowGroupFrame::CalculateRowHeights, nsTableRowGroupFrame::GetHeightBasis, and nsTableRowFrame::CalculateCellActualHeight, which then has interesting interactions with table/cell height code via things like the mPercentHeightObserver member of nsHTMLReflowState and nsTableCellFrame::NotifyPercentHeight, and the SpecialHeightReflow concept in nsTableFrame. (The worst bit is that we could have massively simplified it and sped it up by matching IE6's much cleaner model, but now it's probably too late for that since other browsers have copied us.) -David -- 턞 L. David Baron http://dbaron.org/ 턂 턢 Mozilla https://www.mozilla.org/ 턂 Before I built a wall I'd ask to know What I was walling in or walling out, And to whom I was like to give offense. - Robert Frost, Mending Wall (1914) signature.asc Description: Digital signature ___ dev-platform mailing list dev-platform@lists.mozilla.org https://lists.mozilla.org/listinfo/dev-platform
Re: The worst piece of Mozilla code
On Thu, Oct 16, 2014 at 11:32 PM, Nicholas Nethercote n.netherc...@gmail.com wrote: I was wondering what people think is the worst piece of code in the entire Mozilla codebase. I'll leave the exact meanings of worst and piece of code unspecified... Thanks for the replies so far! I deliberately left this question vague to see what kind of responses people would give. But mostly I'm interested in code whose awfulness impacts users in a serious way. Ones where refactoring/rewriting efforts would be valuable. That excludes code that no longer exists :) With this in mind, a function that is hideous but non-buggy and doesn't cause maintenance problems (e.g. because the hideousness doesn't leak too far) wouldn't qualify as bad. In comparison, a sub-system with frequent subtle correctness issues would be very bad. So I'd be interested in suggestions along these lines. Feel free to email me privately if you prefer. Nick ___ dev-platform mailing list dev-platform@lists.mozilla.org https://lists.mozilla.org/listinfo/dev-platform
Re: The worst piece of Mozilla code
On Fri, Oct 17, 2014 at 8:55 AM, Andreas Gal andr...@mozilla.com wrote: I would like to nominate image/src/* and in particular its class hierarchy which completely doesn’t make any sense what so ever. imgRequest, imgIRequest, we got it all. Does this cause correctness problems, or is it just hard to read and thus modify? Is there a path that could be taken to gradually improve it? Nick ___ dev-platform mailing list dev-platform@lists.mozilla.org https://lists.mozilla.org/listinfo/dev-platform
Re: The worst piece of Mozilla code
The code is really bizarre, needlessly complex and impossible to understand and maintain. We could use a lot of improvements in this area to better decide what images to load when and how and when to retain or purge them. There is a lot of state machinery and multi-threading at work. I wouldn’t be surprised if we find a couple nasty correctness bugs if we ever decide to clean up this mess. bholley is the expert for this code I think. He can give you a better overview (full disclosure: this code used to be much worse before he went to town on it). Andreas On Oct 16, 2014, at 7:33 PM, Nicholas Nethercote n.netherc...@gmail.com wrote: On Fri, Oct 17, 2014 at 8:55 AM, Andreas Gal andr...@mozilla.com wrote: I would like to nominate image/src/* and in particular its class hierarchy which completely doesn’t make any sense what so ever. imgRequest, imgIRequest, we got it all. Does this cause correctness problems, or is it just hard to read and thus modify? Is there a path that could be taken to gradually improve it? Nick ___ dev-platform mailing list dev-platform@lists.mozilla.org https://lists.mozilla.org/listinfo/dev-platform
Re: The worst piece of Mozilla code
On Thursday 2014-10-16 19:45 -0300, Andreas Gal wrote: The code is really bizarre, needlessly complex and impossible to understand and maintain. We could use a lot of improvements in this area to better decide what images to load when and how and when to retain or purge them. Seth has been doing a lot of work on cleaning up the image code lately, most recently on rewriting the caching behavior (including adding the ability to store more than one decoded form of an image, which enables things like downscale-on-decode), which is currently in-progress. -David -- 턞 L. David Baron http://dbaron.org/ 턂 턢 Mozilla https://www.mozilla.org/ 턂 Before I built a wall I'd ask to know What I was walling in or walling out, And to whom I was like to give offense. - Robert Frost, Mending Wall (1914) signature.asc Description: Digital signature ___ dev-platform mailing list dev-platform@lists.mozilla.org https://lists.mozilla.org/listinfo/dev-platform
Re: The worst piece of Mozilla code
I'm not certain that the image/src/ code is as bad as you make out any more. bholley certainly is no longer the expert there; I took over a bunch of his work to clean it up a year or two ago, and Seth is the benevolent dictator now and has done some good cleanup work on it as well. Cheers, Josh On 2014-10-16 6:45 PM, Andreas Gal wrote: The code is really bizarre, needlessly complex and impossible to understand and maintain. We could use a lot of improvements in this area to better decide what images to load when and how and when to retain or purge them. There is a lot of state machinery and multi-threading at work. I wouldn’t be surprised if we find a couple nasty correctness bugs if we ever decide to clean up this mess. bholley is the expert for this code I think. He can give you a better overview (full disclosure: this code used to be much worse before he went to town on it). Andreas On Oct 16, 2014, at 7:33 PM, Nicholas Nethercote n.netherc...@gmail.com wrote: On Fri, Oct 17, 2014 at 8:55 AM, Andreas Gal andr...@mozilla.com wrote: I would like to nominate image/src/* and in particular its class hierarchy which completely doesn’t make any sense what so ever. imgRequest, imgIRequest, we got it all. Does this cause correctness problems, or is it just hard to read and thus modify? Is there a path that could be taken to gradually improve it? Nick ___ dev-platform mailing list dev-platform@lists.mozilla.org https://lists.mozilla.org/listinfo/dev-platform
Re: The worst piece of Mozilla code
I am glad to hear there is so much activity happening there. Kind of makes my point though: that code needed it :) Andreas On Oct 16, 2014, at 8:03 PM, Josh Matthews j...@joshmatthews.net wrote: I'm not certain that the image/src/ code is as bad as you make out any more. bholley certainly is no longer the expert there; I took over a bunch of his work to clean it up a year or two ago, and Seth is the benevolent dictator now and has done some good cleanup work on it as well. Cheers, Josh On 2014-10-16 6:45 PM, Andreas Gal wrote: The code is really bizarre, needlessly complex and impossible to understand and maintain. We could use a lot of improvements in this area to better decide what images to load when and how and when to retain or purge them. There is a lot of state machinery and multi-threading at work. I wouldn’t be surprised if we find a couple nasty correctness bugs if we ever decide to clean up this mess. bholley is the expert for this code I think. He can give you a better overview (full disclosure: this code used to be much worse before he went to town on it). Andreas On Oct 16, 2014, at 7:33 PM, Nicholas Nethercote n.netherc...@gmail.com wrote: On Fri, Oct 17, 2014 at 8:55 AM, Andreas Gal andr...@mozilla.com wrote: I would like to nominate image/src/* and in particular its class hierarchy which completely doesn’t make any sense what so ever. imgRequest, imgIRequest, we got it all. Does this cause correctness problems, or is it just hard to read and thus modify? Is there a path that could be taken to gradually improve it? Nick ___ dev-platform mailing list dev-platform@lists.mozilla.org https://lists.mozilla.org/listinfo/dev-platform ___ dev-platform mailing list dev-platform@lists.mozilla.org https://lists.mozilla.org/listinfo/dev-platform
Re: The worst piece of Mozilla code
On Fri, Oct 17, 2014 at 09:32:20AM +1100, Nicholas Nethercote wrote: On Thu, Oct 16, 2014 at 11:32 PM, Nicholas Nethercote n.netherc...@gmail.com wrote: I was wondering what people think is the worst piece of code in the entire Mozilla codebase. I'll leave the exact meanings of worst and piece of code unspecified... Thanks for the replies so far! I deliberately left this question vague to see what kind of responses people would give. But mostly I'm interested in code whose awfulness impacts users in a serious way. Ones where refactoring/rewriting efforts would be valuable. That excludes code that no longer exists :) With this in mind, a function that is hideous but non-buggy and doesn't cause maintenance problems (e.g. because the hideousness doesn't leak too far) wouldn't qualify as bad. In comparison, a sub-system with frequent subtle correctness issues would be very bad. For that I'd tend to agree with ehsan editor/ and the selection bits in layout/. RDF is more terrible, but probably less important and its more a problem of removal than of refactoring. Trev So I'd be interested in suggestions along these lines. Feel free to email me privately if you prefer. Nick ___ dev-platform mailing list dev-platform@lists.mozilla.org https://lists.mozilla.org/listinfo/dev-platform signature.asc Description: Digital signature ___ dev-platform mailing list dev-platform@lists.mozilla.org https://lists.mozilla.org/listinfo/dev-platform
