[webkit-dev] Announcing new port: Nix

[Luciano Wolf]

Hi Geoffrey,

As it was pointed in the first email of this thread and by Hugo's
email, Nix "targets whoever wants to have a hardware accelerated
WebKit2 port on UNIX-based devices, with a minimum effort". During the
last Contributors Meeting in San Jose, we've had discussions with
Romain Pokrzywka, from Sony and they started contributing libcurl
related code to our port as it would be easier to have this upstreamed
using Nix (as they also maintain a POSIX-based WebKit port for their
needs). In the same conference we've had no objections from Apple
guys. The same happened here in the mailing list until now and we've
been following the guidelines to become a new port.

I really respect your opinion and your questions and I see that we're
working to finish the "port-specific patches" to start working into
"core patches", as you put it.

Before Nix became a project we've had people here from openBossa
participating on Qt port and some of them became reviewers (so, there
is commitment from our side, otherwise no one would become a
reviewer).

The most recent effort from our side is to provide WebRTC support.
Thiago Lacerda is talking with Eric Carlson and they are coordinating
the merge of Blink patches as well as planning the development of
missing features. So, I believe we are in the right path to become a
mainstream port.

Regards,
Luciano

On Tue, Sep 10, 2013 at 9:42 PM, Geoffrey Garen <ggaren at apple.com> wrote:
>        Does your code fix bugs or improve performance in WebCore or
> JavaScriptCore?
>
>
> As any other WebKit port WebCore bugs are fixed when we found it and
> need a fix, our current performance focus is on CoordinatedGraphics
> and there are another team working on get the canvas faster.
>
>
> I don’t share your premise that all ports, by their nature, improve the
> correctness and performance of core code.
>
> Can you point to some important correctness and/or performance improvements
> WebKit will see if it adopts your code into trunk?
>
>
>        Does the simplification you mentioned allow us to remove existing
> port-related code?
>
>
> Not really, it's possible to unite the glib users in many parts, but
> to remove existing port-related code depend on the existing port
> owners.
>
>        You mentioned that EFL, GTK, and/or Qt could switch to this port. Do
> they have any plans to do so?
>
>
> No, we can't decide what other ports do, would be nice to have a
> convergence to glib on GTK, EFL and Nix ports, but this doesn't depend
> on us. In fact a port can be built on top of Nix, but I doubt any
> existing port will do this right now.
>
>
> In that case, what is the benefit to WebKit?
>
> Geoff