On May 27, 2009, at 11:47 AM, Adam Barth wrote:
I've been doing some work recently in our JavaScript bindings. As
part of this work, I've noticed that WebCore/bindings/js and
WebCore/bindings/v8 have drifted apart in some details. It's kind of
ridiculous that we have so much duplicated code in these two folders.
We should try to re-organize our bindings to share as much code as
possible.
1) Where should the common code live? One option is to have:
WebCore/bindings/js <--- common code
WebCore/bindings/jsc <--- JSC specific
WebCore/bindings/v8 <--- V8 specific
2) How much should we try to share? For example, we could have an
abstracted notion of ArgList that works for both engines, or we could
be happy to factor out common routines like createWindow
<http://trac.webkit.org/browser/trunk/WebCore/bindings/js/JSDOMWindowCustom.cpp#L285
>.
I presume Sam is a good contact for the JSC bindings. Who's a good
contact for the V8 bindings?
It's definitely unfortunate that the bindings keep going out of sync.
I have two concerns though:
1) We weren't super enthusiastic about the master WebKit tree trying
to support two different JavaScript engines. But we finally agreed
when the Chrome folks said this was a hard requirement to merge, and
promised they would take on absolutely 100% of the maintenance burden
and impose no cost on the rest of the WebKit project. As a result:
1.a) We're not super keen on refactorings that wouldn't be
justified just for JSC itself. If there is shareable code that is
easily factored out without adding otherwise needless abstraction or
layers of indirection, that's fine, but we don't want to add
indirection that would add any code complexity or runtime cost.
1.b) We couldn't commit to not breaking the v8 bindings when
hacking on the shared layer, if there was one.
2) My understanding is that the v8 bindings are not even fully merged
into the WebKit tree yet - many pieces live externally in the Chromium
repository. So we couldn't meaningfully maintain the v8 bindings even
if we wanted to, and would have no good way to evaluate the soundness
of the shared layer.
Again, I am sure maintaining a second set of JS bindings is annoying,
but the Chrome team felt it was worth the cost to have a separate JS
engine, and committed to taking on the burden.
Regards,
Maciej
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