Web Engines Hackfest according to me

And once again, in December we celebrated the hackfest. This year happened between Dec 7-9 at the Igalia premises and the scope was much broader than WebKitGTK+, that’s why it was renamed as Web Engines Hackfest. We wanted to gather people working on all open source web engines and we succeeded as we had people working on WebKit, Chromium/Blink and Servo.

The edition before this I was working with Youenn Fablet (from Canon) on the Streams API implementation in WebKit and we spent our time on the same thing again. We have to say that things are much more mature now. During the hackfest we spent our time in fixing the JavaScriptCore built-ins inside WebCore and we advanced on the automatic importation of the specification web platform tests, which are based on our prior test implementation. Since now they are managed there, it does not make sense to maintain them inside WebKit too, we just import them. I must say that our implementation is fairly complete since we support the current version of the spec and have almost all tests passing, including ReadableStream, WritableStream and the built-in strategy classes. What is missing now is making Streams work together with other APIs, such as Media Source Extensions, Fetch or XMLHttpRequest.

There were some talks during the hackfest and we did not want to be less, so we had our own about Streams. You can enjoy it here:

You can see all hackfest talks in this YouTube playlist. The ones I liked most were the ones by Michael Catanzaro about HTTP security, which is always interesting given the current clumsy political movements against cryptography and the one by Dominik Röttsches about font rendering. It is really amazing what a browser has to do just to get some letters painted on the screen (and look good).

As usual, the environment was amazing and we had a great time, including the traditional Street Fighter‘s match, where Gustavo found a worthy challenger in Changseok 🙂

Of course, I would like to thank Collabora and Igalia for sponsoring the event!

And by the way, quite shortly after that, I became a WebKit reviewer!

ReadableStream almost ready

Hello dear readers! Long time no see! You might thing that I have been lazy, and I was in blog posting but I was coding like mad.

First remarkable thing is that I attended the WebKit Contributors Meeting that happened in March at Apple campus in Cupertino as part of the Igalia gang. There we discussed of course about Streams API, its state and different implementation possibilities. Another very interesting point which would make me very happy would be the movement of Mac to CMake.

In a previous post I already introduced the concepts of the Streams API and some of its possible use cases so I’ll save you that part now. The news is that ReadableStream has its basic funcionality complete. And what does it mean? It means that you can create a ReadableStream by providing the constructor with the underlying source and the strategy objects and read from it with its reader and all the internal mechanisms of backpresure and so on will work according to the spec. Yay!

Nevertheless, there’s still quite some work to do to complete the implementation of Streams API, like the implementation of byte streams, writable and transform streams, piping operations and built-in strategies (which is what I am on right now).I don’t know either when Streams API will be activated by default in the next builds of Safari, WebKitGTK+ or WebKit for Wayland, but we’ll make it at some point!

Code suffered already lots of changes because we were still figuring out which architecture was the best and Youenn did an awesome job in refactoring some things and providing support for promises in the bindings to make the implementation of ReadableStream more straitghforward and less “custom”.

Implementation could still suffer quite some important changes as, as part of my work implementing the strategies, some reviewers raised their concerns of having Streams API implemented inside WebCore in terms of IDL interfaces. I have already a proof of concept of CountQueuingStrategy and ByteLengthQueuingStrategy implemented inside JavaScriptCore, even a case where we use built-in JavaScript functions, which might help to keep closer to the spec if we can just include JavaScript code directly. We’ll see how we end up!

Last and not least I would like to thank Igalia for sponsoring me to attend the WebKit Contributors Meeting in Cupertino and also Adenilson for being so nice and taking us to very nice places for dinner and drinks that we wouldn’t be able to find ourselves (I owe you, promise to return the favor at the Web Engines Hackfest). It was also really nice to have the oportunity of quickly visiting New York City for some hours because of the long connection there which usually would be a PITA, but it was very enjoyable this time.