In a lonely corner of Mozilla-land, Taras Glek has been working on tools to support automated analysis and rewriting of the Mozilla codebase. I hadn’t gotten a chance to play with these tools until recently, when I started working on mozilla2 code refactoring pretty much full-time. And Taras’ tools are amazing!

For instance, for XPCOMGC we needed to identify Mozilla XPCOM classes that need to inherit from GCObject. Taras has an uber-cool tool called Dehydra that reflects the C++ AST into JavaScript: with a little handholding, I was able to write the logic for this task in in 127-line JS file!

Processing (122/2004): ./security/manager/ssl/src/nsSmartCardMonitor.ii...  running dehydra... done.

It takes about 4 hours to run this script on every file in the tree (using multiple cores could make this much faster). Then I use a python script to post-process the output and create gcobject.patch (truncated example patch).

The possible uses of dehydra are almost limitless: it’s very likely that in due course we will do nightly dehydra runs with scripts that detect bad code patterns; it’s also possible to set up a tryserver to run dehydra over a build tree.

See the Mozilla wiki for more information about dehydra, including links to a PDF specification and more information from Taras’ blog.

This entry was posted on 11 Oct, 2007 at 12:10 pm and is tagged with , dehydra, mozilla2. Trackback.