The Firefox SVG Code-Bloat Crisis

Fellow Novell-er and longtime Mozilla contributor Robert O'Callahan penned a blistering (yet obviously well-intentioned) philippic the other day on code-bloat in the Firefox SVG engine. For a minute there, I didn't think anyone else still cared about code size or memory usage. Happily, that turns out not to be the case. O'Callahan worries about code size at the bit level.

But code size is not the only issue. O'Callahan dives quite deeply into the architectural waters and comes up with refreshingly brash statements like "XPCOM is a disease ... people acquire it by being exposed to infected code." He bristles at the notion that a single SVG <rect> element requires 1.2 Kbytes of pointer storage and carries around empty transformLists. (One wonders what he would say about Java, wherein a mere JPanel has 330 methods.)

The real problem, of course, is the SVG spec, which defies any attempt at elegant implementation.

Bring on sXBL with a <canvas> binding.

The views expressed here are entirely my own, not those of my employer.