News for hackers. Stuff that matters.
Re:New Mac Pro Tech Specs by kbumsik on Thursday September 26, 2019 @10:26PM (#21087865)
I don't have an HEDT but an outdated Haswell i5 laptop (not an Ultra Low Voltage model at least, so it's quite fast). Last year I spotted a bug in Firefox and I though it was time to put a line in the contribution section in my resume.

The contribution experience was a nightmare because a full build of Firefox took 3 hrs and running the entire testing framework took 4 hrs, though it turned out that I needed to run only a part of the testing framework. Changing a single line and building it again still took more than 30 minutes.

That was the first moment that I wanted a HEDT in my life. It feels like devs who work with big C++ projects would want a bigger workstation because of the significant build time.

Re:New Mac Pro Tech Specs by xuki on Thursday September 26, 2019 @10:39PM (#21087922)
Maybe spin up an instance on GCE or EC2 and remote into it? If you live anywhere near a data center it should be under 50ms delay. Your time is certainly worth more than whatever the cost of the instance.
Re:New Mac Pro Tech Specs by kbumsik on Thursday September 26, 2019 @10:51PM (#21087983)
Probably. But I always try to build Linux programs natively or in an officially supported environment at the first attempt because I'm not sure what potentially cause problems when I build it in a something unsupported environment. On top of that running the testing framework needed an X11 environment. You know, it sometimes also takes significant times to figure out how to set up in a different environment. I might try EC2 if I became a regular firefox contributor.
Re:New Mac Pro Tech Specs by Marsymars on Thursday September 26, 2019 @11:00PM (#21088022)
> If you live anywhere near a data center it should be under 50ms delay.

Hm, I guess I don't live anywhere near a data center. 1M+ North American city, but lowest ping to any AWS/GCE region is ~130ms.

Re:New Mac Pro Tech Specs by zamadatix on Thursday September 26, 2019 @11:33PM (#21088162)
My RTT from the midwestern US to AWS/Azure/GCP in Germany is less than that. I think your ISP has more blame than your distance to the nearest zone in NA.
Re:New Mac Pro Tech Specs by Marsymars on Friday September 27, 2019 @12:45AM (#21088526)
Yes, you guys are entirely correct, something looks fishy with my ISP. I'll give them a call them tomorrow morning if it still looks like this.

Edit: Now resolved, pings (barely) over 50ms.

Re:New Mac Pro Tech Specs by Ecco on Thursday September 26, 2019 @11:24PM (#21088127)
Most likely that latency comes from the link between your place and your ISP.
Re:New Mac Pro Tech Specs by mypalmike on Thursday September 26, 2019 @11:44PM (#21088220)
New York to LA ping time is something like 70ms. Are you going through a proxy?
Re:New Mac Pro Tech Specs by lonelappde on Thursday September 26, 2019 @10:43PM (#21087943)
And it's much easier to set up a build env on a VM than local machine
Re:New Mac Pro Tech Specs by _bxg1 on Thursday September 26, 2019 @10:36PM (#21087913)
Woof. I wasn't aware compilation times got that long for people who aren't building a whole OS.
Re:New Mac Pro Tech Specs by skunkworker on Thursday September 26, 2019 @11:28PM (#21088143)
Try building Chromium from source. Anandtech uses it as a multithreaded benchmark. The top CPUS can average just under an hour compile time.

https://www.anandtech.com/bench/CPU-2019/2224

Re:New Mac Pro Tech Specs by kbumsik on Thursday September 26, 2019 @11:11PM (#21088064)
I wouldn't try contributing if I were aware of it too lol. Imagine that I did it for Chromium. I was told that it takes about 20GB to build Chromium.
Re:New Mac Pro Tech Specs by oldmanhorton on Friday September 27, 2019 @12:35AM (#21088472)
It's usually more, actually. We have seen 100+ GB build directories when building the "all" target and a non-GOMA build easily takes multiple hours on a desktop i7
Re:New Mac Pro Tech Specs by Narishma on Friday September 27, 2019 @06:45AM (#21090425)
A browser nowadays is pretty much a whole OS.
Re:New Mac Pro Tech Specs by TheRealDunkirk on Friday September 27, 2019 @07:28AM (#21090680)
Hmm... Like when Oracle created their "bare metal" product. There just wasn't much left to add to the database engine to eliminate the need for a general-purpose operating system. I suspect graphics, audio, and pointing input may be significant barriers to doing the same thing here.
Re:New Mac Pro Tech Specs by tdsamardzhiev on Friday September 27, 2019 @02:16AM (#21088981)
Well I work in games and building our thing without distributed compilation is inconceivable.
Re:New Mac Pro Tech Specs by Crinus on Friday September 27, 2019 @11:32AM (#21093055)
I remember building Mozilla took around 6 hours in my PC back around 2003. Though granted, that was a Pentium II PC with only 128MB of RAM and most of those hours were probably spent with the OS (Linux) swapping stuff :-P.
Re:New Mac Pro Tech Specs by yitchelle on Friday September 27, 2019 @02:23AM (#21089014)
Are compile farm still relevant in these type of scenario these days?
Re:New Mac Pro Tech Specs by kbumsik on Friday September 27, 2019 @04:20AM (#21089634)
Yes. As a CI pipeline the Firefox team do run their own compile farm called TryServer [1] and is building a various different versions (possibly all of accepted versions) at a time.

Level 1 contributors (contributors who are acknowledged by one of Mozilla dev) grant access to TryServer.

[1]: https://wiki.mozilla.org/ReleaseEngineering/TryServer

Re:New Mac Pro Tech Specs by stephenr on Friday September 27, 2019 @02:58AM (#21089198)
3 HOURS? Does that say more about your workstation or the project?

I've recently built php + most of the bundled extensions, in a VM (on a 2018 Mac mini) and it's only a couple of minutes at most to build.

Re:New Mac Pro Tech Specs by kbumsik on Friday September 27, 2019 @04:06AM (#21089564)
Hey it's Firefox, one of the biggest C++ project you can build for now.
Re:New Mac Pro Tech Specs by tracker1 on Friday September 27, 2019 @01:01PM (#21093950)
A modern browser is a MUCH larger codebase.
Re:New Mac Pro Tech Specs by stephenr on Friday September 27, 2019 @01:13PM (#21094061)
Well perhaps if browsers didn't try to cram every feature of a desktop operating system into their own runtime, it wouldn't be?

Seriously. Chrome and Firefox are both guilty of this.

Re:New Mac Pro Tech Specs by tracker1 on Friday September 27, 2019 @02:28PM (#21094829)
Okay, support every CSS & JS DOM/API feature without doing so. Create your own browser, and get people to actually use it.