[webkit-dev] WebKit Wishes

Wed Jan 30 13:57:05 PST 2013

Hi Eric,

These are great thoughts. I agree with you on all points. One informative comment below:

On Jan 30, 2013, at 1:28 PM, Eric Seidel <eric at webkit.org> wrote:

> I wish we only had one build system (it were easy to add/remove/move files).
> 
> I believe changes like http://trac.webkit.org/changeset/74849 are an unhealthy sign for the project.  Adam is not the only person who has chosen to empty files instead of removing them.  The pain of updating 8 build system is so great, we jump through hoops to avoid it.  Which means it took us months to move JavaScriptCore/wtf to WTF, and will take us years to kill WebCore/platform.
> 
> 
> I wish I felt like reviewers understood/trusted each other more.
> 
> I’ve worked at both Apple and Google.  The WebKit community is full of brilliant engineers.  Yet I frequently feel a lack of trust in my (or others) judgement, or witness hot-headed remarks on bugs, lists or IRC.  I don’t think it’s that people don’t trust me after nearly 8 years (!?) on this project, but rather that we forget, or fail to communicate trust among ourselves.  Social problems are perhaps harder to solve for us technical types, but I worry that for many of us it’s just become “us” and “them” and we’ve stopped trying.
> 
> 
> I wish it were easy to work on feature branches.
> 
> We have no good solution for features.  For one-patch features, you do them on your own.  For larger, you maybe use github or most likely you just land on trunk behind a #define.  None of these have worked well.  Some of this is the limits of SVN, but it should be trivial for someone to work on a new feature a long time, w/o endangering trunk or having massive merge pain every day.  Other projects can do this.  So should we.  This is both impeding progress, and destabilizing trunk.
> 
> 
> I wish we didn’t have to worry about platforms we couldn’t test.
> 
> It can’t be the job of the core maintainers to care about all the peripheral ports which contribute very little core code. Our code needs to be structured in such a manner that its easy for the core to march forward, while letting the ports catch up as they need to asynchronously.  Platform support code shouldn’t even need to be in webkit.org!  Porting webkit.org’s platform abstractions should be trivial, but core developers (which probably 90% of them use only 2 ports Mac WK2 + Chromium Linux) shouldn’t need to worry about keeping all ports working.
> 
> 
> I wish that the tree always built and tested cleanly.
> 
> Other (much larger) projects than WebKit accomplish this.  Yet somehow Google pays 2 full-time engineers to watch our bots and yet we fail.  I know other companies do similar.  Automated rollouts is one solution.  Branched-based development, or trybots are others.  But at the size and scale we’re at now, every minute of a broken tree, is 100x or more minutes of potentially lost developer productivity.
> 
> 
> I wish I felt like I could follow what was going on (and trust WebKit to guard the web, instead of depending on Apple or Google).
> 
> We’re the leading browser engine, with hundreds of committers, any of whom can add an API to 50% of internet browsers with a single commit.  I wish we had a public process for feature/web-api review.  I wish I felt like both major companies were willing participants in such.  (Google has an internal process, but it sees limited use, in part because it’s powerless -- a ‘yes’ from our process is not a ‘yes’ from WebKit.)  I want to feel like I can better observe and participate in the development of our web-api (and trust that it’s being done well!) without scanning every changeset just to be able to comment post-facto.  (This is also reflected in the fact that the features enabled by the major Apple or Google ports are wildly different, with seemingly little rhyme or reason.)
> 
> 
> I wish WebCore was not trapped by Mac WebKit1’s legacy designs.
> 
> WebKit2 is obviously a step towards the future.  But until we can kill the Widget tree, the insanely fragile loader complexity, and the limits imposed by the least-common-denominator on classes like ResourceRequest, we’re still trapped in the past. One of the things I’ve learned in working on Chromium, is that we were wrong many years ago to fold our platform abstraction (Qt-implementation) and khtml into one library.  In a sand-boxed multi-process world, the rendering library is just a hunk of code running the same on every platform.  And platform code has no place in our core engine code (aka WebCore).

In designing WebKit2, we tried to avoid some mistakes in the WebKit1 Mac API design (such as exposing the underlying network library, exposing our NSView hierarchy as part of the API, and giving too much salience to frames). While we can't remove those parts of the API entirely, if we get more Mac API clients onto WebKit2, then the performance of these details of the WK1 API becomes less critical, and we can simulate them in ways that have lower performance but also less impact on WebCore.

> 
> 
> I write less out of pain, and more out of hope for the future.  I believe all of these are solvable problems, but I believe we need the will to solve them.  Apple’s recent announcement of WebKit2 lockdown is clearly one attempt at some of these.  But for the other 50% of WebKit developers who don’t work on WebKit2, locking down WebCore is not a good solution.
> 
> I think we need to work together to bring about some of these dreams, for the short and long term health of the WebKit project.
> 
> Thank you for listening.
> 
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