[webkit-qt] webkit2, v8, diplomacy

[Alexis Menard]

On Tue, Jun 5, 2012 at 10:51 AM, Coda Highland <chighland at gmail.com> wrote:
>>> I don't understand why the push for V8 in the first place. JSC and V8
>>> are in an arms race for performance, so you can't categorically say V8
>>> is faster because that's not always true.
>>
>> I did not say it's faster or superior but using two js engines in a stack is
>> insane.
>
> I agree completely. That's exactly what I was trying to say: Why V8?
> Why not JSC? Having both is absurd, and JSC seems like a simpler
> solution, so using V8 makes little sense to me.

But V8 is the engine of QML so if you use the QML API of QtWebKit for
Qt5 then V8 is loaded de-facto.

>
>>> JSC also has broader support
>>> (see Konstantin's post). Furthermore, my understanding is that V8
>>> doesn't expose the necessary APIs to be able to provide the full scope
>>> of the QtScript API. (Has this changed since the original plans to
>>> move to V8 were announced?)
>>
>> I don't think v8 lack's any API that JSC has. If we only consider public
>> API, I think v8 is much more rich - maybe I'm wrong. Anyway, declarative -
>> which is really a fundamental of Qt5 - is using v8 and I guess there is a
>> reason for that and it's not desirable to move it to JSC.

QML developers moved away from JSC (Qt4) so they will not move back for sure.

>
> I'll retract my statement about APIs; further research on the matter
> indicates that the only one QtScript offered that V8 couldn't was
> offline syntax checking.
>
> But my actual question still stands:
>
> Why is Declarative using V8? I didn't understand the rationale for
> that in the first place. No one would ever give me a straight answer.
> Why couldn't it use JSC? Is it purely a licensing issue? (V8 is BSD,
> JSC is LGPL) Is there some feature of V8 that really helps Qt's use
> case? Or was it just "V8 was faster at the time the decision was
> made"? Because, as I mentioned, which of V8 and JSC is faster varies
> from release to release.

There was somehow an answer on the Qt5-dev mailing list recently.

To make it short : V8 has a stable API, JSC not. That's kind of a
problem for project which doesn't move at the same peace. JSC guys are
not very encline to add API that serves other use cases than a Web JS
Engine.
V8 apparently was faster for QML use cases.

>
> This was a decision that was made without any input from the community
> or any information given to the community; we were just told "We're
> using V8" and that was that.
>
> That's what I'm upset about, and everything I can see so far seems to
> indicate that V8 just makes things harder. It's another dependency
> that has to be pulled into Qt, and the choices are to either drag
> around two JS engines or maintain a patch set to use V8 instead of JSC
> for QtWebKit. Maybe we can use Chromium's patches for the job, maybe
> we can't, I don't know, but this sounds like a pain in the butt; does
> anyone really benefit?

Apparently QML guys does have a lot of benefits using V8 directly so...

>
> /s/ Adam
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-- 
Alexis Menard (darktears)
Software Engineer
openBossa @ INdT - Instituto Nokia de Tecnologia