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

• Let's review this patch!
• Still hacking on 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.
    • [x] Custom List (this is the Frequently Visited stuff) - Frequent is ENABLED by default - Recent is DISABLED by default - Don't need separators
    • [x] Tasks
    • [x] Update methods so that tasks and custom lists are added in the same method call. So a single populate method that takes something like... (taskDescriptions, customTitle, customListDescriptions)
    • [x] Finish the URL removal thing. Basically, if an item was removed via the shell, the next call to AppendCategory cannot include that item with the same display name - the next call needs to display something else entirely.
    • [ ] See how Thunderbird uses JumpListBuilder in case there are things we need to support there.
    • [ ] Figure out how to make the above testable. Then write tests.
      • [ ] Let's update WinTaskbar to have a new method that can be accessed from native code (so not through XPCOM), called, like, DoCreateJumpListBuilder or something. Have it take an argument that is a reference to something that implements a JumpListManager interface. Have JumpListBuilder move that thing to the background thread - the background thread owns it. Then, in our tests, have our GTest call DoCreateJumpListBuilder, passing it something that mocks out JumpListManager. And then call it's populateJumpList method for testing.
    • [ ] Make our approach preffable. Put all the old stuff back (gulp), and update WindowsJumpList to use the new mechanism on a pref.
    • [x] Implement clearJumpList (it's called deleteActiveList)
    • [ ] 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.
    • [ ] Remove the old implementation! Hooray!
    • [ ] Migrate off of dedicated lazy thread to background thread pool

Rate this episode

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