[webkit-dev] The "WebCore/platform/" directory situation

[Maciej Stachowiak]

On Oct 3, 2008, at 9:17 PM, David Hyatt wrote:

> After working for a while on the WebCore/platform/ directory, it's  
> become clear that people don't really know what this directory is  
> supposed to contain (and by people I mean pretty much everybody,  
> both inside and outside Apple).  The purpose of the platform/  
> directory is to serve as a foundation library for WebCore.  It  
> provides a widget toolkit, graphics primitives, basic data  
> structures and wrappers around low level OS services.  It should not  
> depend on any other parts of WebCore, but can depend on  
> JavaScriptCore/wtf.

I agree with Hyatt on this. Although in most respects we don't enforce  
strict modularity in WebCore, this is one case where it is important,  
and we have been lax in maintaining the layering of WebCore/platform.

> I also think it would be worthwhile to discuss options for  
> preventing these layering violations from occurring going forward.   
> We need to make these violations impossible.  I'd love to hear  
> suggestions on that front (separate library, hacked include paths,  
> etc.).  Whatever we decide should be implementable by Mac, Win, Gtk,  
> Qt, wx and Chromium, since we don't want platform-specific code in  
> platform to violate layering either.

I think we should pull WTF and Platform into separate top level  
modules. On Mac OS X they would build static libraries that get linked  
into JavaScriptCore and WebCore respectively. Other ports may want to  
do it slightly differnetly.

We have a lot fewer layering problems with WebCore and WebKit in part  
because they are separate modules, and you have to go out of your way  
and make some Client interfaces to create unfortunate entanglements.

Regards,
Maciej