Hi,
On 08/14/18 11:29, Rogério Brito wrote:
Nice. I wish my coding skills weren't so old-school, or I could offer
help beyond just testing. It would be nice to see Quantum's speed and
efficiency (to the extent that it would be effective) on PPC
machines. This could possibly have a carry-over affect on TenFourFox,
the Mac OS X/PowerPC fork of Firefox-ESR, as Cameron is basically
left to applying security patches and optimizations to the old ESR code.
Some of the code (that is, the non-OSX parts) that Kaiser Cameron is
producing (especially the Altivec optimizations to decoding videos and
the JIT of Firefox) would be quite welcome if supplied in a clean
fashion to Mike Hommey, the Debian maintainer of Firefox (who also
happens to be an upstream developer at Mozilla).
there is a lot of good stuff, but also hold your breath. I am working on
the code to generalize his work so that it works on x86-32bit (64bit is
currently off-limits for the code, it would need even more work to
remove Carbon) so that it can be used on older intel macs too. It is
absolutely not an easy task, I have been working closely with Cameron
for months: his code was worked for years against a single OS and CPU
target. So in my case it had endianness issues, which are to a larger
extent fixed.
We have a x86 build working as a proof, but I did not release anything
to the public since it is not as stable as the PPC version, although it
proves how much can be "squeezed" from older Macs.
The good news is that most of the patches are now accepted in Cameron's
code, other are private to my github repository because "not clean enough".
By analyzing the code, I can tell you that a lot would be needed to get
them on non-Mac systems. Of course, it could be done.
I'm not sure Quantum is better in anything. On NetBSD I am using the
rust-based Firefox and it appears more bloated and trade-off memory with
performance. Also, I personally dislike the "new" interface, but that is
taste.
Rust is a pain and slow to death, slower actually. I build it on x86
machines which are faster than all G4 machines I know and it takes
hours/days. We already have pain with gcc and clang... now rust, oh, man.
Perhaps Pale Moon could be ported to PPC? The community is not that
happy with ports/forks apparently though, although it appears to be only
a naming issue and an issue of dependent libraries.
Riccardo
