On Mon, Jul 24, 2017 at 6:21 PM, Enrico Weigelt, metux IT consult <enrico.weig...@gr13.net> wrote: > On 24.07.2017 20:40, Nathan Froyd wrote: >> 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). > > OTOH, we should keep in mind that most distros dont do cross compiling. > Some distros (eg. gentoo or lfs) are also building on the target. > > I don't like the idea of kicking away these platforms.
We do take into account the needs of Linux distributions when making changes. So far as I am aware, our compilation requirements for Linux platforms have not caused huge amounts of headaches. >>> 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. > > I'd guess it could be helpful for developers not running Windows, > at least for doing some build checks. Developers not running Windows tend to use our try server for compiling on Windows. There are some good reasons for cross-compiling to Windows, but none of them have become important enough to seriously consider making the switch. >>> 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. > > Well, why is the main program so big that linking takes up so much > memory ? Perhaps a lack of proper modularization ? Well, libxul (the main shared library in Firefox) is rather large, but we're not going to split it into smaller libraries. We *did* have multiple shared libraries in the past, and there was a significant startup and performance hit for doing that. So we have one large shared library to link now. > One thing we could do about that might be limitig the exported symbols > of shared libraries (only export the really necessary ones). We already do that. Eyeballing the `readelf -sW` output from my Firefox nightly on Linux, libxul exports ~1% of all the symbols it defines. Other people have mentioned options for pushing patches; my preferred tool for doing this is git-bz-moz: https://github.com/mozilla/git-bz-moz -Nathan _______________________________________________ dev-platform mailing list dev-platform@lists.mozilla.org https://lists.mozilla.org/listinfo/dev-platform
