On Mon, Jul 24, 2017 at 4:25 PM, Enrico Weigelt, metux IT consult <enrico.weig...@gr13.net> wrote: > On 24.07.2017 16:00, Mike Hoye wrote: >> Unfortunately we have to build _for_ a number of our supported operating >> systems without being able to build _on_ those operating systems. > > Is that a big problem ? > > At least within Linux world, it's daily business for me (well, I'm > doing a lot of embedded projects).
Sure, it's daily business for us, too. Mike cited examples in his response (e.g. we cannot compile natively on 32-bit systems, Android included, so Firefox for such platforms is cross compiled from a 64-bit platform). > Haven't tried on Windows yet. Can we crosscompile it from Linux ? No. There are a few people interested, but there are lots of issues. >> That's been true for some time now; while we still support 32-bit systems, >> for example, you can't build Firefox on 32-bit systems at all due to >> memory constraints, > > This raises the question: why does it take up so much memory ? Because Firefox is a large program, and linking large programs takes up a large amount of memory, more than is addressable on 32-bit systems. >> This means some people on older hardware or OSes aren't able build >> Firefox, that's true, > > Not sure, whether an 4core i7 w/ 8GB RAM already counts as "old", but > it's really slow on my box. I've got the impression there's stil a lot > of room for optimizations. For example, I wonder why lots of .cpp-files > are #include'd into one. Because doing this actually makes builds faster and the final binary smaller. See https://blog.mozilla.org/nfroyd/2013/10/05/faster-c-builds/ for details. If you had more RAM, your builds would likely be much faster. Four C++ compiles could easily take 1-1.5GB of memory apiece, and you would probably like to run other programs while you compile. There are probably many places the build can be optimized; if you have a suggestion, please file a bug at https://bugzilla.mozilla.org/enter_bug.cgi?product=Core&component=Build%20Config >> but it doesn't mean they have no way to contribute to Firefox, > > A CI for contributors would be very nice here. For example, I don't > have any Windows systems for decades. You can request level 1 commit access to our try infrastructure: https://www.mozilla.org/en-US/about/governance/policies/commit/access-policy/ That will enable you to build Firefox with your patches on all the major platforms we support. -Nathan _______________________________________________ dev-platform mailing list dev-platform@lists.mozilla.org https://lists.mozilla.org/listinfo/dev-platform
