uniffi-rs
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mozilla
Add support for Gecko C++ and JS consumers
In the early days of developing this tool, we had concrete plans to integrate UniFFI comoponents into Desktop Firefox for JS consumers, and we landed a prototype C++/WebIDL/JS bindings backend that could support them. A subsequent iteration of the tool lead to us prototyping an API for consumption by C++ consumers. In both cases, we did not end up shipping any production UniFFI components into Desktop Firefox.
In https://github.com/mozilla/uniffi-rs/pull/990 I am proposing to remove the prototype Gecko bindings backend to simplify ongoing development of UniFFI, and I plan to close out some older issue tracking proposed changes to it.
Instead, let's use this issue to gather context and serve as the entry point for a future effort to ship UniFFI components into Desktop Firefox, whenever we next come to that.
┆Issue is synchronized with this Jira Task ┆Issue Number: UNIFFI-75
Here are some high-level notes and context on where we got to with this effort last time; you can also find some good historical artifacts by searching closed issues/prs for the string "gecko".
- There's some great historical commentary on the initial landing of the GeckoJS backend in #11.
- There is a suite of design-docs and prototype code linked in this issue comment which will be a great starting point, although some details need updating. In particular:
- an ADR for JS bindings
- an ADR for C++ bindings
- Additional work-in-progress PRs in #285 and #255.
- Some issues that were not fully addressed in those initial docs include:
- How to handle blocking IO, especially for C++ consumers? Ref #298.
- Some initial work on making the C++ calls asynchronous in PR #350.
- How to test the bindings, without having to build all of Gecko in our CI? Ref #272.
- How much will this affect the compiled binary size of Firefox? We already have some trouble landing Rust code that significantly increases the size of the compiled artifact.
- How to handle blocking IO, especially for C++ consumers? Ref #298.
Love your summary (and your format of documenting "here's pointers to what we learned the last time we tried this"—totally gonna steal that)! The Gecko stuff always felt like a "look, we can do this, omg!" prototype, with a long, long tail of fixes and integration work needed to actually make it real—and it shouldn't be holding back all the other cool things you've been doing with it!
❤️❤️❤️ that autofill, FxA client, logins, and tabs are all UniFFIed now, it's been so exciting seeing (from the sidelines, at least 🥺) this take off!
Miss you all!
if I refactor what has been removed here: https://github.com/mozilla/uniffi-rs/pull/990 could we have a new bindings on javascript with uniffi-rs please?
if I refactor what has been removed here: #990 could we have a new bindings on javascript with uniffi-rs please?
There is nothing to refactor. The code from #990 integrates with the JavaScript engine of Gecko (what powers Firefox). It's mostly C++ code (and some IDL), only really useful directly in Gecko. It's newer and supported version now lives here: https://searchfox.org/mozilla-central/source/toolkit/components/uniffi-bindgen-gecko-js
JavaScript bindings would need to be build from scratch, and we currently are not working on any.
fwiw, I'm closing this issue as its initial intent is met.
