Re: New Module Proposal. libseed

[Havoc Pennington <havoc pennington gmail com>]

Hi,

On Wed, May 13, 2009 at 2:38 PM, Owen Taylor <otaylor redhat com> wrote:
>  - Alignment with HTML components in GNOME. The apparent trend towards
>   WebKit in Epiphany, Yelp, etc certainly gives a strong impetus to
>   going towards JavascriptCore and avoiding a Gecko dependency.

It's worth noting that the gecko dependency is purely a
how-the-tarballs-are-done dependency, not a code dependency. That is,
spidermonkey does not actually link to anything else in gecko, it is a
standalone 600k library. Its namespace is JS_, not anything about NS
or Moz.

Debian appears to package it separately as "libmozjs" even. But it's a
big mess because then xulrunner doesn't actually use that copy or
something. In essence it's a mess upstream as far as packaging,
there's no standard upstream install location, .pc file, etc.

But, code-wise, spidermonkey is just a smallish standalone library, is
the point.

I don't even think there's much downside to using spidermonkey in the
same process as webkit, since spidermonkey is small. It's just the
same scenario as using webkit inside a python app or a C++ app. It
doesn't matter that the python or C++ isn't used inside the html
widget, either.

Where you do get some "synergy" is that xulrunner (not inside the web
widget, but outside) can plausibly use modules from gjs. But this
would be irrelevant for something like the old Gecko-based epiphany,
because JS there is used only inside the web widget, so gjs modules
would never be usable. So it sort of only matters for xulrunner apps.

Havoc