[Webkit-unassigned] [Bug 27551] Make it possible to build JavaScriptCore as shared library without symbol lists

[bugzilla-daemon at webkit.org]

https://bugs.webkit.org/show_bug.cgi?id=27551





--- Comment #36 from Kevin Ollivier <kevino at theolliviers.com>  2010-06-17 11:56:43 PST ---
(In reply to comment #35)
> I don't think it's good to have both JS_EXPORT_PRIVATE and JS_EXPORTDATA. It's not immediately clear which you should use where.

I did plan on removing them but this patch was big enough as it was and I was hoping to do it as a separate step. However, I can adjust the patch to move everything to one symbol as you suggest. 

> JS_EXPORT_PRIVATE is a confusing phrase because, read literally, it's an oxymoron: things that are private are things that are *not* exported.
>
> Maybe standardizing on something like "JS_EXPORTED_SYMBOL" would be better.

I'll go ahead and change this.

> If this patch made symbol export work the same on all platforms, so that all you had to do when exporting a symbol was to add JS_EXPORTED_SYMBOL to it, without updating any .exp or .def files, I'd be really excited about it. 

It doesn't do that because I'm not an expert on all the other ports' build systems, and this isn't a simple matter of just copying and pasting a file path. If you think about it, though, moving Mac, or Win, or any other port to this is probably not more than a couple hours work. If this patch is not landed, someone will have to do all this work anyway, and someone will have to continue to maintain the .def and .exp files anyway, so I think it would make sense from a maintenance perspective for each port to put in a small amount of effort to move to this.

>But as it stands, it's just global clutter and more maintenance work for the core maintainers of JavaScriptCore, with no benefit to them. As a result, I'm inclined to say 'no' to this patch.

Well, the whole reason I even delved into doing this was because the commentary on this patch so far suggests that this approach is the only way that would be accepted to move us away from using .def and .exp files. It was a lot of work to do, and wx needs it to be able to use JSCore as a shared library, which it needs to get DumpRenderTree working again. 

I'm working on cleaning up the patch now with the issues reported by the bots and with your suggestions, and I hope in the next iteration you'll reconsider.

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