The Baseline Interpreter: A Faster JavaScript Interpreter in Firefox 70

Re:The Baseline Interpreter: A Faster JavaScript Interpreter... by michaelmrose on Friday August 30, 2019 @04:39PM (#20842469)

Linux distros tend to ship with firefox and linux users are more concerned with open source. It would be strange if the percentage of mozillas userbase using linux was smaller than the general percentage of pc users running linux.

Its probably more fair to go on profit not revenue.

100 million in revenue * 2.18% is 2.2 million. A decrease of 10% of that is 220k. If engineers at mozilla are 150k then 3 months of work is aprox 38k.

This would put the break even point at losing 2% of its linux users by not spending the money.

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Re:The Baseline Interpreter: A Faster JavaScript Interpreter... by leeoniya on Friday August 30, 2019 @05:44PM (#20843008)

there are a lot of assumptions in your reply.

> 3 months of work

according to whom? this will almost certainly need more than a single engineer's eyes on it. and even if it is 3 months, that's 3 months they don't spend working on features for 98% of their userbase.

i want this to happen as much as anyone, but i just don't see the compelling math here. it's a chicken-egg problem (if FF could use VA API [1], then more might switch to linux).

personally, i'm happy that Panfrost recently got mainlined.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Video_Acceleration_API

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