The Joy of Coding

Reminder - no plan survives breakfast.

Episode guide

• Feel free to send pull requests to the repo!
• Here’s a contributing guide!
• Here’s the guide for creating pull requests that smurfd used and recommends!

Today

• Extensions update
  • firefox-dev mailing list that you can subscribe to
    • Blog post about MV3 and Unified Extensions
    • Follow Planet: https://planet.mozilla.org/
    • https://fosstodon.org/@planetmozilla
    • https://mozilla.github.io/standards-positions/
    • https://blog.mozilla.org/en/privacy-security/privacy-analysis-of-floc/

Back to WindowsJumpLists!

- - Goal: I want the JumpListManager to only ever be accessed off of the main thread, so that the main thread in the parent process never has to await a lock.

    - [x] Get rid of maxListItems, since it doesn't appear to be used
    - [x] Get rid of isListCommitted
    - [x] Make .available return a Promise
    - [x] Make abortListBuild return a Promise
    - [x] Make deleteActiveList return a Promise
    - [x] Make SetAppUserModelId return a Promise
    - [x] Add WebIDL for JumpListShortcutDescription and add populateJumpList method to JumpListBuilder.
    - [ ] Investigate what kinds of lists we need to populate 

    - [ ] Figure out how to make the above testable.
    - [ ] Make populateJumpList work to create jump list items all in one shot
    - [ ] Implement clearJumpList
    - [ ] **See if the above works.** If it does, get rid of old changes that we don't need and merge patches down
    - [ ] Update WindowsJumpList.jsm to use the new API instead of the old one.
    - [ ] Update WindowsJumpList.jsm to be simpler so that it doesn't try to do so much lazy stuff since now it's all off of the main thread
    - [ ] Remove the old implementation! Hooray!
    - [ ] Migrate off of dedicated lazy thread to background thread pool

- Q: When will WebGPU be available in the main release? - This is the bug to enable it in Nightly

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Chat

• Join us in the Livehacking room on Mozilla’s Matrix instance! Here’s documentation on how to join. I’m only sorta monitoring the Twitch chat. A bot will try to bridge Matrix and Twitch (joc-bridgebot).

Links

• Felicia Bacon
• nbp hacks on the SpiderMonkey JS engine
• Alessandro Castellani has been streaming himself livehacking on Thunderbird
• emilio hacks on Firefox!
• Compiler Compiler - watch a Mozilla engineer hack on the SpiderMonkey JavaScript engine!
• How mconley uses Mercurial
• Andreas Kling hacks on a custom browser engine for a hand-rolled OS called SerenityOS
• The Joy of Coding: Community-Run Episode guide
  • Feel free to send pull requests to the repo!
  • Here’s the guide for creating pull requests that smurfd used and recommends!
• I've been mirroring the episodes to YouTube
• Code Therapy with Danny O’Brien
• Watch a developer put together a Windows game from scratch (no third-part engines) - really great explanations: https://handmadehero.org/
• /r/WatchPeopleCode for more livehacking!

Glossary

• BHR - “Background Hang Reporter”, a thing that records information about when Firefox performs poorly and sends it over Telemetry
• e10s ("ee ten ESS") - short for Electrolysis, which is the multi-process Firefox project
• CPOW ("ka-POW" or sometimes "SEE-pow") = Cross-Process Object Wrapper. See this blog post.
• Deserialize - "turn a serialized object back into the complex object”
• Serialize - "turn a complex object into something that can be represented as primitives, like strings, integers, etc
• Regression - something that made behaviour worse rather than better. Regress means to “go backward”, more or less.
• l10n - localization
• a11y - accessibility
• i18n - internationalization
• k8s - kubernetes

Feedback

• @mconley@fosstodon.org on Mastodon
• @mike_conley on Twitter
• You can chat with me on Matrix at @mconley:mozilla.org
• mikeconley.ca/blog
• mconley at mozilla dot com