[webkit-dev] can we stop using Skipped files?

[Ryosuke Niwa]

On Fri, Jun 8, 2012 at 1:06 PM, Filip Pizlo <fpizlo at apple.com> wrote:

>
> On Jun 8, 2012, at 1:04 PM, Ryosuke Niwa wrote:
>
> I agree that we've accumulated way too many unit tests in webkitpy and
> some of our unit test code is hideous but I think it's quite unrealistic
> not to have any unit tests. We've had many regressions in the past, and
> it's hard to make sure your code works on all platforms without tests. So
> it's the balance that's important.
>
>
> I think you've had regressions because the code is too complex.
>

I don't think that's true from my experience working on webkitpy so far.
The root of problem is that we support way too many configurations &
platforms, and Chromium port has had a completely different test runner
program called test_shell. We've mostly transitioned (except Mac?) to
DumpRenderTree at this point, but that has added a lot of code complexity
(it probably accounts 20-30% if not 40-50% of all the code in layout_tests).

We also have a lot of abstractions around filesystem, etc... in
webkitpy/common, which I'm not a big fun of. I think some of that is
inherited from the era where we had to use some features that weren't
supported in Python 2.5. Now that we no longer support Python 2.5, we can
probably cleanup some of that mess.

>  I am intrigued by the notion of using Erlang, but worry that it would
>> reduce effective hackability due to there being less Erlang experience in
>> the universe.  I also don't want the porting of Erlang's runtime to be a
>> gating factor for porting WebKit itself.  Hence, I fear that we should
>> stick to broadly accepted languages, like Python, or Perl, or if need be,
>> C++.
>>
>
> If I were to write a new test runner, I'd use C++ without a question. It
> has solid threading support in almost all operating systems, is statically
> typed, and virtually everyone who contributes to WebKit can read/write well.
>
>
> I would try to avoid using C++ unless we really had to.  The goal here is
> simplicity, and C++ is not the best for that.
>

Can you think of any other programming language that has a solid threading
support and everyone in the WebKit community knows how to read/write?  Like
you implied, I would never ever use Java for example.

- Ryosuke
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