Gabriele Svelto
I've been working on wiring up Firefox build system with Geany so that it can be used as an IDE for development with integration for Rust, C/C++ and Python language servers. For contributors who want a full-blown IDE it's a much better option than Visual Studio Code which is both a resource hog and a security liability.
Jun 10 at 3:33pmWeb
Show threadwyatt2d ago
@gabrielesvelto not your responsibility to, but since i haven't built firefox in about 11 months now, anyone working on removing nodejs as a build-time requirement?
Would be nice to have something positive to think about next time I roll my personal fork patches forward. Assuming my memory is correct and bootstrap.py calls in node stuff in some way or another
Show threadwyatt2d ago
@gabrielesvelto (i promise i'm not trying to be annoying, just wondering what else has changed in the build system since around ff 139/140, which is where I'm at now)
Show threadGabriele Svelto2d ago
@wyatt in all fairness I don't remember what it's for. I'm tempted to uninstall it and see what breaks. It's kind of ironic that we depend on it given we already have a headless JavaScript interpreter that's built into the project (xpcshell).
Show threadwyatt2d ago
@gabrielesvelto yeah i think i've mentioned how node.js is a big reason i haven't been able to build firefox for powerpc32 in a long time. And thus why big endian bugs probably keep piling up and not being reported. :(

Annoying to have V8 as a dependency for a spidermonkey browser
Show threadwyatt2d ago
@gabrielesvelto (thus restricting the architectures firefox builds on to the ones that chromium supports)
Show threadAndrew Zonenberg2d ago

@gabrielesvelto I really like Geany, although I don't use any of its IDE features personally (I run in non-project mode and just use it as a fancy text editor with regex search/replace, code folding, etc).

It's a nice step up from e.g. gedit without the bloat of something heavy.

Show threadGabriele Svelto2d ago
@azonenberg me too, I've always used it as a fancy editor more than anything else. But I realized that it's relatively easy to add our most advanced IDE Integration to it so I went ahead and did it. In a project the size of Firefox the code exploration features of a language server - such as looking up type and function definitions - is a big help for someone who's new to the project.
Show threadAndrew Zonenberg2d ago

@gabrielesvelto Yeah makes sense. Personally I find all kinds of autocomplete etc annoying because the concept-to-code path in my brain works faster than the visual-to-understanding loop.

So I type void foo( and before I realize the editor has added the closing parenthesis I've already typed one myself and now I have two. Then I have to recognize what happened and backspace over one of them and I end up being slower and less productive.

Show threadAndrew Zonenberg2d ago

@gabrielesvelto ngscopeclient is probably the biggest codebase I work in in it, and it's a bit over a quarter million lines currently so probably... 100x smaller than firefox?

And as the lead developer and original author of much of the code I'm extremely familiar with where to find things so it's easy to just have tabs open with a class definition and switch back to check on the exact arguments to a method or something.

Show threadGildilinie Gremlin 🏳️‍⚧️2d ago
@gabrielesvelto is geany good should I try it
Show threadGabriele Svelto2d ago
@gildilinie it is lean, fast, has a very nice editor with bookmarks, line manipulation, fancy search, etc... plus simple IDE-like project management and a ton of plugins for extra functionality
Show threadGildilinie Gremlin 🏳️‍⚧️1d ago
@gabrielesvelto does it use normal PC shortcuts lol
Show threadGabriele Svelto1d ago
@gildilinie yes!