[webkit-dev] Proposal: Remove ENABLE(MATHML)

[Adrian Perez de Castro]

Hi Fred,

On Mon, 23 Oct 2017 17:42:29 +0200, Frédéric WANG <fred.wang at free.fr> wrote:
 
> There have been some discussions recently on
> https://bugs.webkit.org/show_bug.cgi?id=177744 regarding the relevance
> of the compile-time flag for MathML. Discussing with Olivier during the
> Web Engines Hackfest, it seems he only had disabled MathML in his
> project because he thought it would reduce binary size. However, he was
> not really sure this actually had a significant impact. AFAIK, the only
> dependencies needed for MathML are the font libraries but they are
> already used for text layout. The implementation is only a few
> element/rendering files plus some changes here and there.

From your description it sounds that what takes more disk space in MathML are
the needed math fonts, and that the amount of code added to WebKit when built
is in the order of hundreds of kilobytes, at most (BTW, do you have figures of
MathML enabld vs. disabled to confirm?). That being the case, it seems fine to
me that MathML support is always enabled.

Usually my main concern with removing compilation guards is forcing additional
usage of megabytes of disk and/or memory in embedded platforms (which is, for
example, the case for ENABLE_VIDEO: for the GTK+ and WPE ports it completely
avoids the GStreamer dependency, which saves tens of megabytes!). But keeping
the guards to save just a few hundreds of kilobytes is certainly not worth it,
and in this case embedders can choose to not ship the math fonts.

TL;DR: Fine by me, as it seems the compile flag only saves a few kilobytes in
the built binaries, and the math fonts can't be skipped anyway by embedders.

Best regards,


--
 Adrián 🎩

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