[webkit-dev] Public APIs for accessing the Javascript debugger

[Adam Barth]

demallien,

My sense from Oliver's response is that there aren't any plans to
start this process.  He's one of the key decision makers on this topic
and he sounds pretty negative about creating such an API.

Generally, the WebKit project tries to be careful about creating
public APIs because they constrain future development of the engine
(because we strive for API compatibility).  Although JavaScriptCore as
a whole has been around for quite a while, the debugging capability is
relatively new.

Maintaining a specially patched version of WebKit can be a lot of
work, so I can certainly understand your reluctance.  I wish you the
best of luck.

Adam


On Tue, Jun 14, 2011 at 9:32 AM, demallien <demallien at me.com> wrote:
>  WebKit-Dev Development <webkit-dev at lists.webkit.org>
> On 14 Jun, 2011,at 06:30 PM, demallien <demallien at mac.com> wrote:
>
> Yup, that sounds pretty "official" to me :)
>
> In which case, are there any plans to start this process?  JavascriptCore
> has been around for quite a while now, and this is a relatively important
> piece of technology to have for a development environment.  Certainly, it is
> a definite pain point for me to not have this API publicly available - it
> makes it just that much harder for me to support users of my Javascript
> framework, I'm going to have to supply them with a specially patched version
> of webkit, which is something that I really didn't want to have to do...
>
> Alli
>
> On 14 Jun, 2011,at 06:21 PM, Oliver Hunt <oliver at apple.com> wrote:
>
> It depends on what you mean by "official"
> I would probably r- any patch that attempted to create such an API, but it's
> conceivable that a sensible API could be made that masked the current
> craziness sufficiently to allow the craziness to be removed later.  But any
> API would need to be very carefully thought out, and would probably require
> multiple iterations to get to the point where we'd consider the API
> sufficiently good.
> --Oliver
> On Jun 14, 2011, at 9:12 AM, demallien wrote:
>
> Is that an official response?
>
> On 14 Jun, 2011,at 06:03 PM, Oliver Hunt <oliver at apple.com> wrote:
>
> The current debugging mechanism is not particularly pleasant to use, nor is
> it very future proof, it has significant performance costs, and it requires
> the user to have significant knowledge of the inner workings of JSC.
>
> Before we started considering exposing JS debugging through API (and
> therefore introducing additional binary compatibility requirements) we would
> need to have an improved debugging mechanism that resolved these issues.
>
> --Oliver
>
> On Jun 14, 2011, at 7:38 AM, demallien wrote:
>
>> Hi,
>>
>> I'm interested in providing a public C API for accessing debugger
>> functionality in JavascriptCore. Ideally I would like the code to be merged
>> into webkit, so I wanted to know if there is a policy reason for not already
>> having debugger APIs available in the public JavascriptCore APIs? If so, my
>> work will obviously not be compatible with the policy, and I won't bother
>> trying to conform to webkit coding standards, as the code will clearly not
>> be accepted into webkit. Othwerwise I'll make an effort to make it fit in
>> with the rest of the system.
>>
>> So, is there a reason for there not being a publically accessible debugger
>> API?
>>
>> Alli
>> _______________________________________________
>> webkit-dev mailing list
>> webkit-dev at lists.webkit.org
>> http://lists.webkit.org/mailman/listinfo.cgi/webkit-dev
>
>
>
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