The Surrealist Clock of JavaScript

It’s been a long time since I last blogged. In the interim I started a new job at Igalia as a JavaScript Engine Developer on the compilers team, and attended FOSDEM in Brussels several million years ago in early February back when “getting on a plane and traveling to a different country” was still a reasonable thing to do.

In this blog post I would like to present Temporal, a proposal to add modern and comprehensive handling of dates and times to the JavaScript language. This has been the project I’m working on at Igalia, as sponsored by Bloomberg. I’ve been working on it for the last 6 months, joining several of my coworkers in a cross-company group of talented people who have already been working on it for several years.

This is the kind of timekeeping you get with the old JavaScript Date… (Public domain photograph by Julo)

I already collaborated on a blog post about Temporal, “Dates and Times in JavaScript”, so I won’t repeat all that here, but all the explanation you really need is that Temporal is a modern replacement for the Date object in JavaScript, which is terrible. You may also want to read “Fixing JavaScript Date”, a two-part series providing further background, by Maggie Pint, one of the originators of Temporal.

How Temporal can be useful in GNOME

I’m aware that this blog is mostly read by the GNOME community. That’s why in this blog post I want to talk especially about how a large piece of desktop software like GNOME is affected by JavaScript Date being so terrible.

Of course most improvements to the JavaScript language are driven by the needs of the web.¹ But a few months ago this merge request caught my eye, fixing a bug that made the date displayed in GNOME wrong by a full 1,900 years! The difference between Date.getYear() not doing what you expect (and Date.getFullYear() doing it instead) is one of the really awful parts of JavaScript Date. In this case if there had been a better API without evil traps, the mistake might not have been made in the first place, and it wouldn’t have come down to a last-minute code freeze break.

In the group working on the Temporal proposal we are seeking feedback from people who are willing to try out the Temporal API, so that we can find out if there are any parts that don’t meet people’s needs and change them before we try to move the proposal to Stage 3 of the TC39 process. Since I think GNOME Shell and GNOME Weather, and possibly other apps, might benefit from using this API when it becomes part of JavaScript in the future, I’d be interested in finding out what we in the GNOME community need from the Temporal API.

It seems to me the best way to do this would be to make a port of GNOME Shell and/or GNOME Weather to the experimental Temporal API, and see what issues come up. Unfortunately, it would defeat the purpose for me to do this myself, since I am already overly familiar with Temporal and by now its shortcomings are squarely in my blind spot! So instead I’ll offer my help and guidance to anyone who wants to try this out. Please get in touch with me if you are interested.

How to try it out

Since Temporal is of course not yet a built-in object in JavaScript, to try it out we will need to import a polyfill. We have published a polyfill which is experimental only, for the purpose of trying out the API and integrating it with existing code. Here’s a link to the API documentation.

The polyfill is primarily published as an NPM library, but we can get it to work with GJS quite easily. Here’s how I did it.

First I cloned the tc39/proposal-temporal repo, and ran npm install and npm run build in it. This generates a file called polyfill/script.js which you can copy into your code, into a place in your imports path so that the importer can find it. Then you can import Temporal:

const {Temporal} = imports.temporal.temporal;

Note that the API is not stable, so only use this to try out the API and give feedback! Don’t actually include it in your code. We have every intention of changing the API, maybe even drastically, based on feedback that we receive.

Once you have tried it out, the easiest way to tell us about your findings is to complete the survey, but do also open an issue in the bug tracker if you have something specific.

Intl, or how to stop doing _("%B %-d %Y")

While I was browsing through GNOME Shell bug reports to find ones related to JavaScript Date, I found several such as gnome-shell#2293 where the translated format strings lag behind the release while translators figure out how to translate cryptic strings such as "%B %-d %Y" for their locales. By doing our own translations, we are actually creating the conditions to receive these kinds of bug reports in the first place. Translations for these kinds of formats that respect the formatting rules for each locale are already built into JavaScript engines nowadays, in the Intl API via libicu, and we could take advantage of these translations to take some pressure off of our translators.

In fact, we could do this right now already, no need to wait for the Temporal proposal to be adopted into JavaScript and subsequently make it into GJS. We already have everything we need in GNOME 3.36. With Intl, the function I linked above would become:

_updateTitle() {
    const locale = getCachedLocale();
    const timeSpanDay = GLib.TIME_SPAN_DAY / 1000;
    const now = new Date();
    const rtf = new Intl.RelativeTimeFormat(locale, {numeric: 'auto'});

    if (this._startDate <= now && now <= this._endDate)
        this._title.text = rtf.format(0, 'day');
    else if (this._endDate < now && now - this._endDate < timeSpanDay)
        this._title.text = rtf.format(-1, 'day');
    else if (this._startDate > now && this._startDate - now < timeSpanDay)
        this._title.text = rtf.format(1, 'day');
    else if (this._startDate.getFullYear() === now.getFullYear())
        this._title.text = this._startDate.toLocaleString(locale, {month: 'long', day: 'numeric'});
    else
        this._title.text = this._startDate.toLocaleString(locale, {year: 'numeric', month: 'long', day: 'numeric'});
}

(Note, this presumes a function getCachedLocale() which determines the correct locale for Intl by looking at the LC_TIME, LC_ALL, etc. evnvironment variables. If GNOME apps wanted to move to Intl generally, I think it might be worth adding such a function to GJS’s Gettext module.)

Whereas in the future with Temporal, it would be even simpler and clearer, and I couldn’t resist rewriting that method! We wouldn’t need to store a start Date at 00:00 and end Date at 23:59.999 which is really just a workaround for the fact that we are talking here about a date without a time component, that is purely a calendar day. Temporal covers this use case out of the box:

_updateTitle() {
    const locale = getCachedLocale();
    const today = Temporal.now.date();

    const {days} = today.difference(this._date);
    if (days <= 1) {
        const rtf = new Intl.RelativeTimeFormat(locale, {numeric: 'auto'});
        // Note: if this negation seems a bit unwieldy, be aware that we are
        // considering revising the API to allow negative-valued durations
        days = Temporal.Date.compare(today, this._date) < 0 ? days : -days;
        this._title.text = rtf.format(days, 'day');
    } else {
        const options = {month: 'long', day: 'numeric'};
        if (today.year !== this._date.year)
            options.year = 'numeric';

        this._title.text = this._date.toLocaleString(locale, options);
    }
}

Calendar systems

One exciting thing about Temporal is that it will support non-Gregorian calendars. If you are a GNOME user or developer who uses a non-Gregorian calendar, or develops code for users who do, then please get in touch with me! In the group of people developing Temporal everyone uses the Gregorian calendar, so we have a knowledge gap about what users of other calendars need. We’d like to try to close this gap by talking to people.

A Final Note

In the past months I’ve not been much in the mood to write blog posts. My mind has been occupied worrying about the health of my family, friends, and myself; feeling fury and shame at the inequalities of our society that, frankly, the pandemic has made harder to fool ourselves into forgetting if it doesn’t affect us directly; and fury at our governments that perpetuate these problems and resist meaningful attempts at reform.

With all that’s going on in the world, blogging about technical achievements feels a bit ridiculous and inconsequential, but, well, I’m writing this, and you’re reading this, and here we are. So keep in mind there are other important things too. Be safe, be kind, but don’t forget to stay furious after the dust settles.

---

[1] One motivation for why some are eagerly awaiting Temporal as part of the JavaScript language, as opposed to a library, is that it would be built-in to the browser. The most popular library for fixing the deficiencies of Date, moment.js, can mean an extra download of 20–100 kb, depending on whether you include all locales and support for time zones. This adds up to quite a lot of wasted data if you are downloading this on a large number of the websites you visit, but this specifically doesn’t affect GNOME. ↩

Advertisement

Free software at 40°C

It’s that time of year again, time for a belated reflection on the GUADEC conference!

In August I traveled to Thessaloniki, Greece, to attend first the annual GNOME Foundation board handover day, then the advisory board meeting, then the GUADEC conference and associated unconference days.

The board discussion focused quite a lot on the strategic goals for the GNOME Foundation which you can hear more about in executive director Neil McGovern’s talk. Nuritzi has also blogged about the process of putting together these strategic goals.

One of the goals that’s most important to me personally (and in fact, in a slightly different form it was part of my original candidacy statement the first time I was elected to the GNOME Foundation board) is:

Evaluate and adopt new technologies to stay competitive with proprietary desktops.

In the evening after the board handover I got a chance to talk about this with some GNOME people over gyros and why I think it’s important — but that’s a topic that could fill an entire blog post! And I intend to publish one at some point.

I’d like to describe some of the talks that I thought were highlights during the conference days.

Setting a Positive Voice For GNOME, Britt Yazel (video) — One of a surprisingly large number of talks this year about how a large free software project is made up of humans, something which people tend to forget.

Hack: Embedding Learning Tools in the OS, Meg Ford / Manuel Quiñones (video) — This is a great talk about some of the cool stuff in a project which is quite familiar to me; as I had worked on it for a year. I had not really gotten a chance to take a step back and see how cool it actually is, and this talk brought that home for me.

Environmentally Friendly GNOME, Philip Withnall (video) — Fantastic use of the relatively little data we have, to do quite a lot of order-of-magnitude calculations about GNOME’s environmental footprint, as well as suggestions on how to reduce it.

About Maintainers and Contributors, Georges Basile Stavracas Neto (video) — Another talk about humans, and one of the reasons why I think this conference will be regarded as a turning point in GNOME’s history. Georges talks honestly about the struggles that many of us face when we become the public face of a well-known project.

Free Software / Utopia, Deb Nicholson (video) — A strong closer for the conference, and a strong statement of values for a community that is — sorry if I sound like a broken record — made up of humans. I fully support the idea that we shouldn’t just try to equal proprietary software, but to do better, not only technically, but in our treatment of humans!

There were a lot of difficult decisions to make as to which conference track to follow and I ended up switching back and forth a lot, and in addition I was rehearsing my own talk. This meant I still had to miss some things that I would have liked to attend, like (unfortunately) the workshops on Saturday.

On Saturday there was also the annual meeting of the GNOME Foundation, but I think plenty of other people have blogged about that already.

On Sunday I delievered my talk (video, slides) and started to run out of time near the end, so the video shows how I gradually started talking faster and faster… Happily, a few people expressed interest in taking on some of the projects for GJS that I suggested in the talk, and I hope that when the next round of Outreachy and Google Summer of Code internships come around I will be able to be a mentor again.

During the unconference days I did not actually stick very much to the published schedule; I was mostly occupied with hallway conversations. I spent one day with the travel committee talking about what we could do to improve the travel sponsorship process, and taking advantage of the fact that most of the committee was in the same place to review the open tickets.

I also spent some time hacking on GJS, both by myself and with others: Meg Ford and Marco Trevisan started fixing some GJS bugs.

The last day was filled with a whirlwind tour of the many museums of Thessaloniki — anyone who knows me personally knows that I love museums and could have stayed for many more hours in each museum.

Thanks to the GNOME Foundation for sponsoring my attendance.

The Cause and the Effect

This week Richard Stallman resigned as president of the Free Software Foundation. It is long overdue, and I am grateful to Selam G., the writer of the blog post that sparked it.

I was disappointed to read that Michael Meeks’ post Tuesday on Planet GNOME repeated the excuses I’ve seen on Twitter and Reddit about mob rule and mischaracterization. Michael is of course entitled to that opinion, and unlike most Twitter and Reddit threads I’ve seen, has expressed it thoughtfully (which is why I think I can actually achieve something by writing this in turn.) I personally believe that that opinion does not stand up under scrutiny, and I hope writing a counterpoint might give him or others in the GNOME community food for thought.

I believe that we — especially in the GNOME community where it’s a goal to hold ourselves to high standards of treating each other well — must not let ourselves fall into the trap of saying ‘Stallman was just defending a friend, out come the pitchforks, just for one email, who will they come for next’ and thereby fail to see the whole picture. If it was really just one email and not years of well-documented bad behaviour and refusal to change, we’d be having an entirely different conversation.

Many who are grateful that Stallman has finally left the FSF are nonetheless anxious or grieving in some way: for the ideal of someone who may have been a hero to us before we realized what he was like in person; for trepidation about the future of the free software movement; or even for having to watch Stallman bring himself down in an avoidable, decades-long slow-motion train wreck. This is all understandable, but we should not let grief channel itself into minimizing or excusing or working around bad behaviour, or rules-lawyering about the interpretation of Stallman’s words. These two lines from Leonard Cohen and Sharon Robinson, singing about a different kind of grief, seem oddly fitting here:

Do not choose a coward’s explanation
That hides behind the cause and the effect

I will also refer you to Thomas Bushnell’s reflections from which I’d like to emphasize this paragraph, which is a response (expressed better than I could myself) to anyone who thinks that this one event can be regarded in isolation:

RMS’s loss of MIT privileges and leadership of the FSF are the appropriate responses to a pattern of decades of poor behavior. It does not matter if they are appropriate responses to a single email thread, because they are the right thing in the total situation.

The words of Matt Blaze are also appropriate here:

We will, as always, be treated to much examination of the precise nature and mass of the last straw, with observations that it would not by itself be sufficient to cause spinal damage in camels, and is therefore utterly harmless.

---

This post is my personal opinion, and is not written on behalf of the GNOME Foundation, its board of directors, nor anyone else.

Taking Out the Garbage

From the title, you might think this post is about household chores. Instead, I’m happy to announce that we may have a path to solving GJS’s “Tardy Sweep Problem”.

For more information about the problem, read The Infamous GNOME Shell Memory Leak by Georges Stavracas. This is going to be a more technical post than my previous post on the topic, which was more about the social effects of writing blog posts about memory leaks. So first I’ll recap what the problem is.

Garbage, garbage, everywhere

At the root of the GNOME desktop is an object-oriented technology called GObject. GObjects are reference counted, but not garbage collected. As long as their reference count is nonzero, they are “alive”, and when their reference count drops to zero, they are deleted from memory.

GObject reference counting

Graphical user interfaces (such as a large part of GNOME Shell) typically involve lots of GObjects which all increase each other’s reference count. A diagram for a simple GUI window made with GTK might look like this:

A typical GUI would involve many more objects than this, but this is just for illustrating the problem.

Here, each box is an object in the C program.

Note that these references are all non-directional, meaning that they aren’t really implemented as arrows. In reality it looks more like a list of numbers; Window (1); Box (1); etc. Each object “knows” that it has one reference, but it knows nothing about which other objects own those references. This will become important later.

When the app closes, it drops its reference to the window. The window’s reference count becomes zero, so it is erased. As part of that, it drops all the references it owns, so the reference count of the upper box becomes zero as well, and so on down the tree. Everything is erased and all the memory is reclaimed. This all happens immediately. So far, so good.

Javascript objects

To write the same GUI in a Javascript program, we want each GObject in the underlying C code to have a corresponding Javascript object so that we can interact with the GUI from our Javascript code.

Javascript objects are garbage collected, and the garbage collector in the SpiderMonkey JS engine is a “tracing” garbage collector, meaning that on every garbage collection pass it starts out with objects in a “root set” that it knows are not garbage. It “traces” each of those objects, asking it which other objects it refers to, and keeps tracing each new object until it hits a dead end. Any objects that weren’t traced are considered garbage, and are deleted. (For more information, the Wikipedia article is informative: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tracing_garbage_collection)

We need to integrate the JS objects and their garbage collection scheme with the GObjects and their reference counting scheme. That looks like this:

The associations between the Javascript objects (“JS”) and the GObjects are bidirectional. That means, the JS object owns a reference to the GObject, meaning the reference count of every GObject in this diagram is 2. The GObject also “roots” the JS object (marks it as unable to be garbage collected) because the JS object may have some state set on it (for example, by writing button._alreadyClicked = false; in JS) that should not be lost while the object is still alive.

The JS objects can also refer to each other. For example, see the rightmost arrow from the window’s JS object to the button’s JS object. The JS code that created this GUI probably contained something like win._button = button;. These references are directional, because the JS engine needs to know which objects refer to which other objects, in order to implement the garbage collector.

Speaking of the garbage collector! The JS objects, unlike the GObjects, are cleaned up by garbage collection. So as long as a JS object is not “rooted” and no other JS object refers to it, the garbage collector will clean it up. None of the JS objects in the above graph can be garbage collected, because they are all rooted by the GObjects.

Toggle references and tardy sweeps

Two objects (G and JS) keeping each other alive equals a reference cycle, you might think. That’s right; as I described it above, neither object could ever get deleted, so that’s a memory leak right there. We prevent this with a feature called toggle references: when a GObject’s reference count drops to 1 we assume that the owner of the one remaining reference is the JS object, and so the GObject drops its reference to the JS object (“toggles down“). The JS object is then eligible for garbage collection if no other JS object refers to it.

(If this doesn’t make much sense, don’t worry. Toggle references are among the most difficult to comprehend code in the GJS codebase. It took me about two years after I became the maintainer of GJS to fully understand them. I hope that writing about them will demystify them for others a bit.)

When we close the window of this GUI, here is approximately what happens. The app drops its references to the GObjects and JS objects that comprise the window. The window’s reference count drops to 1, so it toggles down, dropping one direction of the association between GObject and JS object.

Unlike the GObject-only case where everything was destroyed immediately, that’s all that can happen for now! Everything remains in place until the next garbage collection, because at the top of the object tree is the window’s JS object. It is eligible to be collected because it’s not rooted and no other JS object refers to it.

Normally the JS garbage collector can collect a whole tree of objects at once. That’s why the JS engine needs to have all the information about the directionality of the references.

However, it won’t do that for this tree. The JS garbage collector doesn’t know about the GObjects. So unfortunately, it takes several passes of the garbage collector to get everything. After one garbage collection only the window is gone, and the situation looks like this:

Now, the outermost box’s JS object has nothing referring to it, so it will be collected on the next pass of the garbage collector:

And then it takes one more pass for the last objects to be collected:

The objects were not leaked, as such, but it took four garbage collection passes to get all of them. The problem we previously had, that Georges blogged about, was that the garbage collector didn’t realize that this was happening. In normal use of a Javascript engine, there are no GObjects that behave differently, so trees of objects don’t deconstruct layer by layer like this. So, there might be hours or days in between garbage collector passes, making it seem like that memory was leaked. (And often, other trees would build up in the intervening time between passes.)

Avoiding toggle references

To mitigate the problem Georges implemented two optimizations. First, the “avoid toggle references” patch, which was actually written by Giovanni Campagna several years ago but never finished, made it so that objects don’t start out using the toggle reference system. Instead, only the JS objects hold references to the GObjects. The JS object can get garbage collected whenever nothing else refers to it, and it will drop its reference to the GObject.

A problem then occurs when that wasn’t the last reference to the GObject, i.e. it’s being kept alive by some C code somewhere, and the GObject resurfaces again in JS, for example by being returned by a C function. In this case we recreate the JS object, assuming that it will be identical to the one that was already garbage collected. The only case where that assumption doesn’t hold, is when the JS code sets some state on one of the JS objects. For example, you execute something like myButton._tag = 'foo';. If myButton gets deleted and recreated, it won’t have a _tag property. So in the case where any custom state is set on a JS object, we switch it over to the toggle reference system once again.

In theory this should help, because toggle references cause the tardy sweep problem, so if fewer objects use toggle references, there should be fewer objects collected tardily. However, this didn’t solve the problem, because especially in GNOME Shell, most JS objects have some state on them. And, sadly, it made the toggle reference code even more complicated than it already was.

The Big Hammer

The second optimization Georges implemented was the affectionately nicknamed “Big Hammer”. It checks if any GObjects toggled down during a garbage collector pass, and if so, restart the garbage collector a few seconds after. This made CPU performance worse, but would at least make sure that all unused objects were deleted from memory within a reasonable time frame (under a minute, rather than a day.)

Combined with some other memory optimizations, this made GNOME 3.30 quite a lot less memory hungry than its predecessors.

An afternoon at Mozilla

Earlier this year, I had been talking on IRC to Ted Campbell and Steve Fink on the SpiderMonkey team at Mozilla for a while, about various ins and outs of being an external (i.e. not Firefox) user of SpiderMonkey’s JS engine API. Early September I found myself in Toronto, where Ted Campbell is based out of, and I paid a visit to the Mozilla office one afternoon.

I had lunch with Ted and Kannan Vijayan of the SpiderMonkey team where we discussed the current status of external SpiderMonkey API users. Afterwards, we made the plans which eventually became this GitHub repository of examples and best practices for using the SpiderMonkey JS engine outside of Firefox. We have both documentation and code examples there, and more on the way. This is still in progress, but it should be the beginning of a good resource for embedding the JS engine, and the end of all those out-of-date pages on MDN!

I also learned some good practices that I can put to use in GJS. For example, we should avoid using JS::PersistentRooted except as a last resort, because it roots objects by putting them in a giant linked list, which is then traced during garbage collection. It’s often possible to store the objects more efficiently than that, and trace them from some other object, or the context.

Ending the tardy sweeps

In the second half of the afternoon we talked about some of the problems that I had with SpiderMonkey that were specific to GJS. Of course, the tardy sweep problem was one of them.

For advice on that, Ted introduced me to Nika Layzell, an engineer on the Gecko team. We looked at the XPCOM cycle collector and I was surprised to learn that Gecko uses a scheme similar to toggle references for some things. However, rather than GJS sticking with toggle references, she suggested a solution that had the advantage of being much simpler.

In “Avoiding toggle references” above, I mentioned that the only thing standing in the way of removing toggle references, is custom state on the JS objects. If there is custom state, the objects can’t be destroyed and recreated as needed. In Gecko, custom state properties on DOM objects are called “expandos” or “expando properties” and are troublesome in a similar way that they are in GJS’s toggle references.

Nika’s solution is to separate the JS object from the expandos, putting the expandos on a separate JS object which has a different lifetime from the JS object that represents the GObject in the JS code. We can then make the outer JS objects into JS Proxies so that when you get or set an expando property on the JS object, it delegates transparently to the expando object.

Kind of like this:

In the “before” diagram, there is a reference cycle which we have to solve with toggle references, and in the “after” diagram, there is no reference cycle, so everything can simply be taken care of by the garbage collector.

In cases where an object doesn’t have any expando properties set on it, we don’t even need to have an expando object at all. It can be created on demand, just like the JS object. It’s also important to note that the expando objects can never be accessed directly from JS code; the GObject is the sole conduit by which they can be accessed.

Recasting our GUI from the beginning of the post with a tree of GUI elements where the top-level window has an expando property pointing to the bottom-level button, and where the window was just closed, gives us this:

Most of these GObjects don’t even need to have expando objects, or JS objects!

At first glance this might seem to be garbage-collectable all at once, but we have to remember that GObjects aren’t integrated with the garbage collector, because they can’t be traced, they can only have their reference counts decremented. And the JS engine doesn’t allow you to make new garbage in the middle of a garbage collector sweep. So a naive implementation would have to collect this in two passes, leaving the window’s expando object and the button for the second pass:

This would require an extra garbage collector pass for every expando property that referred to another GObject via its JS object. Still a lot better than the previous situation, but it would be nice if we could collect the whole thing at once.

We can’t walk the whole tree of GObjects in the garbage collector’s marking phase; remember, GObject references are nondirectional, so there’s no generic way to ask a GObject which other GObjects it references. What we can do is partially integrate with the marking phase so that when a GObject has only one reference left, we make it so that the JS object traces the expando object directly, instead of the GObject rooting the expando object. Think of it as a “toggle reference lite”. This would solve the above case, but there are still some more corner cases that would require more than one garbage collection pass. I’m still thinking about how best to solve this.

What’s next

All together, this should make the horrible toggle reference code in GJS a lot simpler, and improve performance as well.

I started writing the code for this last weekend. If you would like to help, please get in touch with me. You can help by writing code, figuring out the corner cases, or testing the code by running GNOME Shell with the branch of GJS where this is being implemented. Follow along at issue #217.

Additionally, since I am in Toronto again, I’ll be visiting the Mozilla office again this week, and hopefully more good things will come out of that!

Acknowledgements

Thanks to Ted Campbell, Nika Layzell, and Kannan Vijayan of Mozilla for making me feel welcome at Mozilla Toronto, and taking some time out of their workday to talk to me; and thanks to my employer Endless for letting me take some time out of my workday to go there.

Thank you to Ted Campbell and Georges Stavracas for reading and commenting on a draft version of this post.

The diagrams in this post were made with svgbob, a nifty tool; hat tip to Federico Mena Quintero.

JavaScript news from GNOME 3.30

Welcome back to the latest news on GJS, the Javascript engine that powers GNOME Shell, Endless OS, and many GNOME apps.

I haven’t done one of these posts for several versions now, but I think it’s a good tradition to continue. GNOME 3.30 has been released for several weeks now, and while writing this post I just released the first bugfix update, GJS 1.54.1. Here’s what’s new!

If you prefer to watch videos rather than read, see my GUADEC talk on the subject.

JavaScript upgrade!

GJS is based on SpiderMonkey, which is the name of the JavaScript engine from Mozilla Firefox. We now use the version of SpiderMonkey from Firefox 60. (The way it goes is that we upgrade whenever Firefox makes an extended support release (ESR), which happens about once a year.)

This brings a few language improvements: not as many as in 2017 when we zipped through a backlog of four ESRs in one year, but here’s a short list:

• Asynchronous iterators (for await (... in ...))
• Rest operator in object destructuring (var {a, b, ...cd} = ...)
• Spread operator in object literals (obj3 = {...obj1, ...obj2})
• Anonymous catch (catch {...} instead of catch (e) {...})
• Promise.prototype.finally()

There are also some removals from the language, of Mozilla-specific extensions that never made it into the web standards.

• Conditional catch (catch (e if ...))
• For-each-in loops (for each (... in ...))
• Legacy lambda syntax (function (x) x * x)
• Legacy iterator protocol
• Array and generator comprehensions ([for (x of iterable) expr(x)])

Hopefully you weren’t using any of these, because they will not even parse anymore! I wrote a tool called moz60tool that will scan your source files and hopefully flag any uses of the removed syntax. It’s also available as a shell extension by Andy Holmes.’

Time for your code to get a checkup… Photo by rawpixel.com on Pexels.com

ByteArray

A special note about ByteArray: the SpiderMonkey upgrade made it necessary to rewrite the ByteArray class, since support for intercepting property accesses in C++-native JS objects was removed, and that was what ByteArray used internally to implement expressions like bytearray[5].

The replacement API I think would have made performance worse, and ByteArray is pretty performance critical; so I took the opportunity to replace ByteArray with JavaScript’s built-in Uint8Array. (Uint8Array didn’t exist when GJS was invented.) For this, I implemented a feature in SpiderMonkey that allows you to store a GBytes inside a JavaScript ArrayBuffer object.

The result is not 100% backwards compatible. Some functions now return a Uint8Array object instead of a ByteArray and there’s not really a way around that. The two are not really unifiable; Uint8Array’s length is immutable, for one thing. If you want the old behaviour back, you can call new ByteArray.ByteArray() on the returned Uint8Array and all the rest of your code should work as before. However, the legacy ByteArray will have worse performance than the Uint8Array, so instead you should port your code.

Technical Preview: Async Operations

The subject of Avi Zajac’s summer internship was integrating Promises and async functions with GIO’s asynchronous operations. That is, instead of this,

file.load_contents_async(null, (obj, res) => {
    const [, contentsBytes, etag] = obj.load_contents_finish(res);
    print(ByteArray.toString(contentsBytes));
});

you should be able to do this:

file.load_contents_async(null)
.then((contentsBytes, etag) => print(ByteArray.toString(contentsBytes)));

or this:

const [contentsBytes, etag] = await file.load_contents_async(null);
print(ByteArray.toString(contentsBytes));

If you don’t pass in a callback to the operation, it assumes you want a Promise instead of a callback, and will return one so that you can call .then() on it, or use it in an await expression.

This feature is a technology preview in GNOME 3.30 meaning, you must opt in for each method that you want to use it with. Opt in by executing this code at the startup of your program:

Gio._promisify(classPrototype, asyncMethodName, finishMethodName);

This is made a bit extra complicated for file operations, because Gio.File is actually an interface, not a class, and because of a bug where JS methods on interface prototypes are ignored. We also provide a workaround API for this, which unfortunately only works on local (disk) files. So the call to enable the above load_contents_async() code would look like this:

Gio._promisify(Gio._LocalFilePrototype, 'load_contents_async', 'load_contents_finish');

And, of course, if you are using an older GNOME version than 3.30 but you still want to use this feature, you can just copy the Promisify code into your own program, if the license is suitable. I’ve already been writing some code for Endless Hack in this way and it is so convenient that I never want to go back.

Debugger

At long last, there is a debugger. Run it with gjs -d yourscript.js!

The debugger commands should be familiar if you’ve ever used GDB. It is a bit bare-bones right now; if you want to help improve it, I’ve opened issues #207 and #208 for some improvements that shouldn’t be too hard to do.

The debugger is based on Jorendb, a toy debugger by Jason Orendorff which is included in the SpiderMonkey source repository as an example of the Debugger API.

Performance improvements

We’ve made some good improvements in performance, which should be especially apparent in GNOME Shell. The biggest improvement is the Big Hammer patch by Georges Stavracas, which should stop your GNOME Shell session from holding on to hundreds of megabytes at a time. It’s a mitigation of the Tardy Sweep problem which is explained in detail by Georges here. Unfortunately, it makes a tradeoff of worse CPU usage in exchange for better memory usage. We are still trying to find a more permanent solution. Carlos Garnacho also made some further improvements to this patch during the 3.30 cycle.

The other prominent improvement is better memory usage for GObjects in general. A typical GNOME Shell run contains thousands or maybe ten-thousands of GObjects, so shaving even a few bytes off per object has a noticeable effect. Carlos Garnacho started some work in this direction and I continued it. In the end we went from 128 bytes per GObject to 88 bytes. In both cases there is an extra 32 byte penalty if the object has any state set on it from JavaScript code. With these changes, GNOME Shell uses several tens of megabytes less memory before you even do anything.

I have opened two issues for further investigation, #175 and #176. These are two likely avenues to reduce the memory usage even more, and it would be great if someone were interested to work on them. If they are successful, it’s likely we could get the memory usage down to 56 bytes per GObject, and eliminate the extra 32 byte penalty.

Eventually we will get to that “well-oiled machine” state… Photo by Celine Nadon on Unsplash

Developer Experience

I keep insisting it’s no coincidence, that as soon as we switched to GitLab we started seeing an uptick in contributors whom we hadn’t seen before. This trend has continued: we merged patches from 22 active contributors to GJS in this cycle, up from 13 last time.

Claudio André landed many improvements to the GitLab CI. For one thing, the program is now built and tested on more platforms and using more compile options. He also spent a lot of effort ensuring that the most common failures will fail quickly, so that developers get feedback quickly.

From my side, the maintainer tasks have gotten a lot simpler with GitLab. When I review a merge request, I can leave the questions of “does it build?” and “are all the semicolons there?” to the CI, and concentrate on the more important questions of “is this a feature we want?” and “is it implemented in the best way?” The thumbs-up votey things on issues and merge requests also provide a bit of an indication of what people would most like to see worked on, although I am not really using these systematically yet.

We have some improvements soon to be deployed to DevDocs, and GJS Guide, a site explaining some of the more basic GJS concepts. Both of these were the subject of Evan Welsh’s summer internship. Evan did a lot of work in upstream DevDocs, porting it from the current unsupported CoffeeScript version to a more modern web development stack, which will hopefully be merged upstream eventually.

It’s about time we had a signpost to point the way in GJS. Photo by Jens Johnsson on Pexels.com

We also have an auto formatter for C++ code, so if you contribute code, it’s easier to avoid your branches failing CI due to linter errors. You can set it up so that it will correct your code style every time you commit; there are instructions in the Hacking file. It uses Marco Barisione’s clang-format-hooks. The process isn’t infallible, though: the CI job uses cpplint and the auto formatter uses clang-format, and the two are not 100% compatible.

There are a few miscellaneous nice things that Claudio made. The test coverage report for the master branch is automatically published on every push. And if you want to try out the latest GJS interpreter in a Flatpak, you can manually trigger the “flatpak” CI job and download one.

What’s coming in 3.32

There are a number of efforts already underway in the 3.32 cycle.

ES6 modules should be able to land! This is an often requested feature and John Renner has a mostly-working implementation already. You can follow along on the merge request.

Avi Zajac is working on the full version of the async Promises feature, both the gobject-introspection and GJS parts, which will make it no longer opt-in; Promises will “just work” with all GIO-based async operations.

Also related to async and promises, Florian Müllner is working on a new API that will simplify calling DBus interfaces using some of the new ES6 features we have gained in recent releases.

I hope to land Giovanni Campagna’s old “argument cache” patch set, which looks like it will speed up calls from JS into C by quite a lot. Apparently there is a similar argument cache in PyGObject.

Finally, and this will be the subject of a separate blog post coming soon, I think we have a plausible solution to the Tardy Sweep problem! I’m really excited to write about this, as the solution is really ingenious (I can say that, because I did not think of it myself…)

Contributors

Thanks to everyone who participated to bring GJS to GNOME 3.30: Andy Holmes, Avi Zajac, Carlos Garnacho, Christopher Wheeldon, Claudio André, Cosimo Cecchi, Emmanuele Bassi, Evan Welsh, Florian Müllner, Georges Basile Stavracas Neto, James Cowgill, Jason Hicks, Karen Medina, Ole Jørgen Brønner, pixunil, Seth Woodworth, Simon McVittie, Tomasz Miąsko, and William Barath.

As well, this release incorporated some old patches that people contributed in the past, even up to 10 years ago, that were never merged because they needed some tweaks here or there. Thanks to those people for participating in the past, and I’m glad we were finally able to land your contributions: Giovanni Campagna, Jesus Bermudez Velazquez, Sam Spilsbury, and Tommi Komulainen.

GUADEC 2018 Reminiscences

This year’s GUADEC in Almería, Spain, was over two months ago, and so here is a long overdue post about it. It was so long ago that I might as well call it a reminiscence! This will be a different kind of post than the ones I’ve done in past years, as plenty of other bloggers have already posted summaries about the talks.

Board of Directors

I didn’t even get to see that many talks anyway, as this was my first GUADEC after being elected to the GNOME Foundation board of directors and I found myself doing a lot of running around to complete things. The board has to prepare for a number of meetings including the GNOME Foundation’s Annual General Meeting that’s always held at GUADEC, and so there was plenty of preparation to be done.

So, except for a few sessions, I mainly followed the “hallway track” this year.

It’s an exciting time to be on the board; it’s been in the news recently that the GNOME Foundation has received two substantial donations, and is hiring some new roles. If you want more information and background, Rosanna Yuen, director of operations, explains all about it in this GUADEC talk.

Interns

Somehow I found myself mentoring two interns this summer, Avi Zajac and Evan Welsh, and both of them were able to attend GUADEC. (I co-mentored Evan with my coworker Manuel Quiñones, who unfortunately could not be there.) I had not done a good job introducing them to each other, but they connected with each other and realized that they were both working with me! If you haven’t already, make sure to read Avi’s blog post and Evan’s blog post for their perspectives on how it went. I was glad to have both of them there and really enjoyed meeting up in person.

Both internships have finished up in the meantime. Evan’s website is viewable here, as well as some improvements to DevDocs which I hope to deploy soon. Avi’s project was released as a technical preview in GNOME 3.30 and will be covered in my next blog post.

JavaScript Talk

I gave one scheduled talk, on GJS and JavaScript, and one unscheduled talk, on Endless Code.

I will cover the material from the JavaScript talk in my next post about the new features in GJS, but for now I wanted to post the slides for everyone’s reference. The video of the talk is here.

Endless Hack Talk

I was voted into one of the conference’s open talk slots with a proposal to talk about Endless Code (since then, renamed to Endless Hack). This is a new (well, it was new at the time of the conference) project at Endless. It’s a continuation of this feature which (I didn’t work on, but) my coworkers demoed about two years ago:

Want to hack on an app in @endlessglobal? Simple, just flip over the window and start coding. All code, build tools, and deps are there. pic.twitter.com/T3maWdw2eI

— Jono Bacon (@jonobacon) January 5, 2017

The Endless Hack product generalizes this idea to the whole desktop. The idea is that you should be able to tinker with everything, and there’s a narrative that guides you along the way and teaches you programming concepts. It’s aimed at children and young teenagers. Although this product hasn’t been released yet, and although some of the source code is currently open it’s not in a finished or usable state yet, I did want to talk about it at GUADEC because I think the ability to learn by tinkering is an important part of the free software experience and a direct consequence of one of the Four Software Freedoms, and it’s something the GNOME community should be aware of.

We also made a survey asking people about their experience learning how to program, or not learning how to program, and it’s still open, because I did not do a very good job in the talk of publicizing the link! You can fill it out here.

I haven’t dared to watch the video of me talking completely unrehearsed, but you can watch it here if you want.

Unconference

I had high hopes for organizing a GJS unconference session like last year, but after a certain point I was just completely tired out. We did eventually have a GJS session that consisted of people hacking on their favourite thing. Happily, I was able to convince Georges Stavracas to fix a regression that was preventing GNOME Shell from starting. I got a chance to work with Meg Ford on testing with JavaScript, and I also got some work done on the GJS debugger, a new feature in GNOME 3.30. I will talk about all this and more in my next post!

We also used some of the unconference time for a kickoff session for the GNOME Developer Center. Bastian Ilsø is leading this initiative and has a lot of material for you to read on what’s happened in the meantime.

Acknowledgements

I’d like to thank the GNOME Foundation for making it possible for me to attend the conference and the board meetings.

Thank you to my coworker Lisette Silva for convincing me to submit the open talk and giving some last-minute feedback beforehand.

Indonesian recipes

In late February and early March I attended the GNOME Recipes hackfest in Yogyakarta, Indonesia. It was my second time visiting Indonesia, and food was a bit of a theme. The hackfest was about GNOME Recipes, so food, but also I love Indonesian food and I was eager to taste some more so I can improve how I cook it at home.

I haven’t contributed to GNOME Recipes. (Shamefully, not even a recipe yet!) So why was I going to a GNOME Recipes hackfest? It’s because on Endless OS we have a Cooking app, which in many ways is not as good as GNOME Recipes. It’s certainly less lovingly curated, and less community-oriented, than GNOME Recipes, and it allows recipe submissions by users while the Endless app is read-only.

However, there are a few things Endless’s Cooking app does better than GNOME Recipes: it is visually more appealing, it’s available in several languages (Arabic, Bengali, English, Portuguese, Spanish, and also a Spanish version customized for Guatemala), and it uses a better database backend (which also makes it fully offline.) It does these things using Endless’s “modular framework,” which if you want to know more about, I gave a talk two years ago at GUADEC. This modular framework is the product that I primarily work on at Endless, so a few of my team joined in the GNOME Recipes hackfest to see whether the two apps could share some technology.

It turns out that Matthias was eager to have somebody come along and make a database backend for GNOME Recipes, so the answer was yes, we could very well share some technology.

As an experiment, we made a recipes “lookalike” app using the modular framework technologies of which you can see some nice screenshots in Martin’s blog post.

We worked out some goals that we wanted to achieve by GUADEC in order to present our work, which you can see in the hackfest notes.

Outreach

There were also some goings on besides the hackfest. On the day before the hackfest started we did an outreach event for the students of AMIKOM University Yogyakarta, where the hackfest was held. We gave some talks on our work, and GNOME contributor and Endless Ambassador Siska closed the morning out with a very successful talk on how to get involved in GNOME.

View this post on Instagram

Universitas AMIKOM Yogyakarta menjadi tuan rumah Recipes Hackfest 2018 (28 Februari – 2 Maret 2018). Recipes Hackfest sendiri merupakan agenda yang diadakan oleh GNOME Recipes team and Endless, yang mempertemukan developer, kontributor, maupun komunitas GNOME untuk membahas berbagai hal, terutama dalam mengembangkan open source, terutama mengenai GNOME dan Endless OS. . . Agenda ini merupakan kerjasama antara Program Studi D3-Teknik informatika dan Amikom Business Park dengan Gnome dan Endless OS dan diadakan selama 3 hari di ruang Inkubator Universitas Amikom Yogyakarta. Dalam agenda ini, Tim pengembang bertemu dengan developer, kontributor, komunitas, maupun pengguna Endless OS, untuk mencari dan mengeksplorasi berbagai resep/cara yang tepat dalam mengembangkan aplikasi yang sesuai dengan kebutuhan pengguna Endless OS dan komunitas GNOME. . . Agenda Recipes Hackfest 2018 ini sendiri dibuka dengan kegiatan outreaching/workshop tentang GNOME dan Endless OS di Ruang Cinema Amikom (27/2). agenda ini diikuti oleh sekitar 100 orang Mahasiswa Universitas AMIKOM Yogyakarta dan para pegiat GNOME community. Terdapat 4 Materi yang disampaikan dalah agenda Outreaching tersebut, yaitu : . . 1. Introduction to GNOME From technology to users by Jonathan Blandford (GNOME Contributor) 2. Introduction to Endless by Cosimo Cecchi (Endless, organizer) 3. Getting involved in GNOME/GSoc/Outreach by Umang Jain (Core apps contributor, GNOME Contributor) 4. Introduction to Flatpak by Philip Chimento (Endless, engineer)

A post shared by Universitas AMIKOM Yogyakarta (@amikomjogja) on Mar 1, 2018 at 5:05pm PST

After that I gave a live demo of how to make a GNOME app, the result of which you can find on GitHub here!

This is me doing the live-coding demo of a GNOME app. Some of the students said I looked like Tony Stark.

 

Translation

One of the most interesting discussions we had was about how to internationalize GNOME Recipes. In different countries people cook very differently, so translating a recipe from one language into another is not enough. You also have to adapt the recipe to the ingredients that you can get in the country, and sometimes it’s not possible to get the same taste. For example, if I wanted to adapt my beloved pesto recipe from Marcella Hazan’s Classic Italian Cookbook, to Indonesia, first of all I’d probably have to substitute Thai basil which would change the taste entirely. Or to adapt Indonesian recipes to Canada, you have to go to some lengths to find ingredients like terasi (shrimp paste) and kemiri (candlenuts), and we just can’t get some of the same vegetables.

It can also be that when one language is used in two countries, the same recipe still won’t work for both. For example, in the UK, baking measurements are given by weight, and in Canada and the US they are given by volume. The metric system (ºC, kg, ml) is used in the UK and the imperial system (ºF, pounds, quarts, ounces, bushels, specks, caltrops, and jeroboams) in the US. To make matters worse, Canada uses the metric system for weight and volume measurements (kg, ml) but oven temperatures are given in Fahrenheit as in the US. All three countries cook with teaspoons and tablespoons, but teaspoons and tablespoons are metric in Canada and the UK (5 ml and 15 ml) but imperial in the US (4.93 ml and 14.79 ml).

We also discussed that many translation tools assume that the source language is always English since that’s the lingua franca of programmers, but it’s definitely not the lingua franca of cooking!

I would go so far as to say that all the existing translation infrastructure that we have for internationalizing GNOME is not going to be good enough to translate the recipes in GNOME Recipes.

Progress since then

In the time since the hackfest, I was able to make a little bit of progress on our goals. I worked on splitting out the code that handles data modelling into DModel, a separate library, so that GNOME Recipes could use it.

Food

I did get a chance to learn the flavors of Indonesian food more. When I lived in the Netherlands I already became familiar with some Indonesian food, but the Indonesian food in Indonesia is really much more delicious. In Vancouver we have only one Indonesian restaurant, which is kind of far away. And I found only one Indonesian store where I can buy ingredients like shrimp paste and candlenuts, which is even farther away.

Siska brought in packets of rendang spice paste for everyone to take home, for which I was especially grateful. Here’s a picture of my rendang that I made when I got back to Vancouver:

Rendang and rice

I also tried to make the spice paste myself (because soon I will be out of the spice paste packets) but I haven’t got it figured out yet.

Some of the other dishes that I’ve made at home:

Gulai curry (substituting kale for the cassava greens)
(The recipe is from Daily Cooking Quest which is a cooking blog from an Indonesian blogger who emigrated to the United States, and I’ve had good luck with those recipes because she uses ingredients that are possible for me to get in Vancouver, and she also gives the Indonesian names of the ingredients)

Mi goreng

I am going to try making gudeg this week, which is a jackfruit curry, a specialty of Yogyakarta.

Acknowledgements

I’d like to thank AMIKOM University Yogyakarta for hosting the hackfest and giving us the opportunity to get some students interested in open source development, and the GNOME Foundation for sponsoring my travel and accommodations during the hackfest. Thanks also to Cosimo, Ekta, Elvin, Emmanuele, Haris, Jonathan, Kukuh, Martin, Matthias, Rama, Siska, and Umang, and also Kiki from Mozilla who joined on the last day, and Angky from Endless who helped arrange the hosting and logistics, for making the event a success!

More Memory, More Problems

In GJS we recently committed a patch that has been making waves. Thanks to GJS contributor Georges Basile “Feaneron” Stavracas Neto, some infamous memory problems with GNOME Shell 3.28 have been mitigated. (What’s the link between GNOME Shell and GJS? GNOME Shell uses GJS as its internal Javascript engine, in which some of the UI and all of the extensions are implemented.)

There is a technical explanation, having to do with toggle-refs, a GObject concept which we use to interface the JS engine’s garbage collector with GObject’s reference counting system. Georges has already provided a fantastic introduction to the technical details so I will not do another one here. This post will be more about social issues, future plans, and answers to some myths I’ve seen in various comments recently. To read this post, you only need to know that the problem has to do with toggle-refs and that toggle-refs are difficult to reason about.

Not a Memory Leak

I really don’t want to call this a memory leak, much less “the GNOME memory leak” that’s become common in the press coverage lately. I find that that sets the wrong expectations for users suffering from these memory problems. You might say that for the end user it makes no difference, their computer’s memory is being occupied by GNOME Shell, so what’s the point in not calling it a memory leak? And you would be partially right. The effect is no different. The expectations are different though, especially for users who have some technical knowledge. A memory leak is a simple problem to fix. When you have one, you run your software under Valgrind or ASAN, you get a backtrace that shows where the memory was allocated that you didn’t free, and you free it. Problem solved. You can even run Valgrind in your automatic tests to prevent new leaks. That’s not the case here, and if we refer to it as a memory leak then it can only cause frustration on the part of users who are aware how simple it is to fix a memory leak.

This problem is different. It’s not a leak in the traditional sense. The memory does eventually get freed, but GNOME Shell holds onto it for too long; long enough to cause problems on some systems. As GJS contributor Andy Holmes put it, it’s a “tardy GC sweep.” I think that has a catchy ring to it, so I’ll call it the “tardy sweep problem” from now on.

Meme by Andy Holmes, used with kind permission

To be honest, I found that the OMG!Ubuntu article about “the memory leak” attracted a lot of comments that don’t sit well with me, and I think that the wrong expectations set by calling it a “memory leak” are partly to blame. With this post, I hope to give a better idea of what GNOME users can expect.

On the bright side, due to the recent publicity and especially the OMG!Ubuntu article, more GNOME developers are talking about the memory problems and suggesting things, which is causing an exciting confluence of ideas that I couldn’t have come up with on my own.

Edit: I want to be absolutely clear that with the above I’m not blaming bug reporters for not knowing whether something is a “proper” memory leak or not. This is intended to bring some attention to the wrong expectations that arise, especially among technically savvy users, when GNOME developers and the tech press use the term “memory leak,” and illustrate why we ourselves should not use the term here.

 

The Big Hammer

CC0 licensed image, by stevepb

I’ve been calling this patch the “Big Hammer” because it’s a drastic measure: starting a whole new garbage collection cycle in order to clean up some objects that we already know should be cleaned up.

The tardy sweep problem has now been mitigated with the Big Hammer, but reducing GNOME Shell’s memory usage has been a battle for years, and it has very little to do with memory leaks.

There are many other causes of high memory usage in GNOME Shell. Some are real memory leaks, that generally get fixed before too long. GNOME Shell developers have had their suspicions about NVidia drivers for years. Another cause is JS memory leaks in GNOME Shell. (Contrary to popular belief, it is possible to leak memory in pure Javascript code. Andy’s new heapgraph tool is useful when tracking these down, but throughout most of the life of GNOME Shell this tool didn’t exist.) There’s also memory fragmentation, which can look like a memory leak in a resource monitor.¹ In addition, when diagnosing reports from users, configurations vary wildly. Memory usage simply differs from system to system. Finally, people have different configurations of Shell extensions, some of which leak memory as well.

The Sad Lifecycle of a GNOME Shell Memory Leak Bug Report

1. User reports “I have a memory leak”
2. Developer runs Valgrind, sifts through Valgrind trace, finds a small leak and fixes it
3. Problem isn’t fixed
4. Repeat 2 and 3 until no leaks shown in the Valgrind trace
5. Problem still isn’t fixed
6. User eagerly awaits each point release hoping for relief, and is disappointed each time
7. Bug report gains popularity, accretes followers like a katamari, some of whom vent about unrelated bugs, hound the developer, or become abusive, until the original point of the bug report is lost
8. Developer can’t do anything productive with the bug report at this point. They know there’s still a memory problem and it’s not a traditional leak, but the bug report is not helping them find it
9. Users don’t accept that answer
10. Developer closes the bug report and makes users even angrier. (Or, developer ignores the bug report until it fizzles out, and makes users sad.)

Here are some examples of long-running bug reports where you can see this dynamic in action. It’s quite sad to observe, because everybody involved is doing what makes perfect sense from their perspective (except for a few people behaving badly), yet the result is a mess.

I hope this illustrates why it’s important to assume that people are acting in good faith.

I know some people will argue that the developer mustn’t close the bug report until the bug is “fixed”, meaning that there is no more unnecessary memory usage. But in my opinion that’s just not a useful way to think of bug reports. GNOME Shell developers know (and so do I, from the GJS side) that GNOME Shell uses a lot of memory. I agree it’s nice to keep a bug report open so that users know that we’re aware of it and it’s on our to-do lists somewhere, but very soon the time we spend dealing with the noise on the bug report eclipses whatever benefit it might bring to the community.

I hope GitLab will improve things a bit here, since if you feel strongly about an issue in the bugtracker, you can upvote it or add an emoji reaction to it. This is a good way for users to show that an issue is important to them, and if enough people use it then it’s a good indicator for me to see which issues are prioritized highest by users and contributors.

5 Myths About GNOME Shell’s Memory Problems (Paraphrased)

“GNOME developers never cared about the tardy sweep problem until OMG!Ubuntu reported on it. They don’t care about users until someone makes them.”

Carlos Garnacho, of GNOME Shell fame, pointed out to me that in a more global perspective there has been a very active hunt for actual memory leaks across many of GNOME Shell’s dependencies for quite some time, and he has personally patched leaks in IBus, AccountsService, libgweather, gnome-desktop, and more.

It seems the tardy sweep problem has gotten worse in recent versions of GNOME, although it’s hard to measure between different systems with different configurations. I don’t know why it’s gotten worse.²

It seems to have been known for a long time, though: for history buffs, it was alluded to in a comment in commit ae34ec49, back in 2011. That knowledge was apparently lost when GJS was without a maintainer for a couple of years. To be honest, it has taken me well over a year to get familiar enough with the toggle-ref code (which integrates the JS garbage collector with GObject’s refcounting system), that I feel even remotely comfortable making or reviewing changes to it. I only fully realized the implications of the tardy sweep problem after talking to Georges and seeing his memory graph.

It seems that a previous GJS maintainer, Giovanni Campagna, was trying to mitigate the tardy sweep problem already five years ago, with a patch that allowed objects to escape the tardy sweep by opting out of the whole toggle-ref system in some cases. Unfortunately, as far as I can tell from my bug tracker archaeology, his patch went through a few reviews and the answer was always “Wow, this is really complicated, I need to study it some more in order to understand it.” Then it fell by the wayside when he stepped down from GJS maintainership.

I picked the patch up again late last year and fixed up most of the bit-rot. It still had a few problems with it. I never found the time to fix it up completely, which Georges kindly took over for me. I initially preferred Giovanni’s patch above the Big Hammer, but unfortunately for me, Georges proved that it wasn’t as effective as we thought it would be, only clearing up about 5% of the tardy sweep memory.³

“GNOME fixed the problem with a shoddy solution. This will decrease performance but they won’t notice because they all have top-of-the-line machines.”

I don’t call it the Big Hammer for nothing. We were concerned about performance regressions too, so that’s reasonable. However, as you can read in the bug tracker, we did actually do some testing on lower-end hardware before merging the Big Hammer, and it was not as bad as I expected. Carlos has been doing some measurements and found that garbage collection accounts for about 2–3% of the time that GNOME Shell occupies the CPU.

However, it’s exactly because we want to be cautious that the Big Hammer has only been committed to master, which will first be released in the unstable GNOME 3.29.2 snapshot. I don’t plan to release it on a stable branch until we’ve run it some more.

Ubuntu has already put the Big Hammer in their LTS version. That’s more of a risk than I would have recommended, but it’s not my decision to make, and I am grateful that we will be getting some testing through that avenue. Endless is also considering putting the Big Hammer in their stable version.

(And alas, I don’t have a top-of-the-line machine. Feel free to donate me one if that’s what’s required to make me conform to some stereotype of GNOME developers. 😇)

“The problem should be fixed now. GNOME Shell will run smooth from now on.”

No, it’s not. GNOME Shell still isn’t that great with memory.

Carlos is working on some merge requests which are approaching being ready to merge, which should make things a bit more memory-efficient. He’s also had some success with experiments trying to reduce memory fragmentation, taking better advantage of SpiderMonkey’s compacting garbage collector.

We are also bouncing around some ideas for making the Big Hammer into a smaller hammer. In particular, we’re trying to see if the extra garbage collections can be restricted to only the JS objects that represent GObjects, since those are the only objects that are affected by the tardy sweep problem. We’re also trying to see if there’s a way to return black-marked (reachable) objects to their original white-marked (eligible for collection) state when a GObject is toggled down in the middle of a garbage collection.

Another approach to investigate is to make better use of incremental garbage collection. SpiderMonkey offers this facility but we don’t use it yet. The idea is, instead of pausing and doing a big garbage collection, we do a slice of a few milliseconds whenever we have time. I don’t know yet whether this will have a large or small effect, or even render the Big Hammer unnecessary.

We’re also going to update to SpiderMonkey 60 in GNOME 3.30 which will hopefully bring in another year’s worth of Mozilla’s garbage collector research and optimization.

Finally, I’m gradually working on another unfinished merge request left over from Giovanni’s tenure as GJS maintainer, that should drastically increase the performance of GNOME Shell’s animations (though not necessarily help with memory.)

“GNOME has no business releasing any new versions until this problem is fixed.”

GNOME has a fixed release schedule, so they release new versions on the release dates, with whatever is aboard the train at that time. That’s not going to change.

“This version of GNOME is going into Ubuntu LTS! GNOME needs to work harder to fix this.”

Of course, I want whatever version of GNOME ships with any Linux distribution to be as good as possible. But as the upstream GJS maintainer, I have no say over what a downstream Linux distribution chooses to ship. The best way for a Linux distro to make sure their release is shipshape, is to contribute resources towards fixing whatever they consider a blocker.

That sounds a bit callous, as if I refuse to fix any bugs that Ubuntu wants fixed; that’s not what I mean at all. But my free time is limited. I’m paid for a part of my GJS maintainer work, but only for specific features. I can’t work to anyone’s external deadlines in my free time, because otherwise I’ll burn out and that’s not good for anyone with any interest in GJS either. Sometimes I have other priorities besides sitting at the computer; sometimes I do have time but no ideas about a particular problem; sometimes my brain isn’t up to fixing a difficult memory problem and I choose to work on something easier.⁴ Bugfixing work isn’t fungible.

I picked Ubuntu to illustrate this example, because contributing is exactly what the Ubuntu team has done; Ubuntu contributors fixed stability bugs in GJS, as well as GNOME Shell and Mutter, for GNOME 3.28. To say nothing of contributors from other downstreams, as well. That’s great and I’m looking forward to more of it! Some commenters seem to see downstreams fixing bugs as something that GNOME developers should be ashamed of, but I believe everyone is better off for it when that happens!

Acknowledgements

Thanks to Carlos Garnacho and Andy Holmes, who commented on a draft version of this blog post. Thanks in addition to Andy who coined the term “tardy sweep” and provided Scruffy as the mascot; Heartbleed has branding, why shouldn’t we? And of course, thanks to Georges who kicked off the whole research in the first place!

---

[1] and has often made people angry in bug reports when told it’s not a memory leak ↩

[2] I have a hunch, though. When I updated SpiderMonkey to version 38 in GNOME 3.24, we went from a conservative collector to an exact-rooted, moving one — see this Wikipedia article for definitions of those terms. It may be that the old garbage collector, though generally considered inferior, did actually mitigate the tardy sweeps a little, because I think back then it would have been possible for more objects to make their way into an ongoing sweep. It’s also possible that it was made worse earlier than that, by some adjustments in GNOME Shell that adjusted how often the garbage collector was called. ↩

[3] Technical explanation: Tweener, which is the animation framework used by GNOME Shell, renders many objects ineligible to opt out of the toggle-ref system. I would like to see Tweener replaced with Clutter implicit animations in GNOME Shell, which would make Giovanni’s patch much more effective, but that’s a big project. ↩

[4] Like writing a blog post about a difficult memory problem. Joke’s on me, that’s actually really hard ↩

Geek tip: g_object_new and constructors

tl;dr Don’t put any code in your foo_label_new() function other than g_object_new(), and watch out with Vala.

From this GJS bug report I realized there’s a trap that GObject library writers can fall into,

Avoid code at your construction site.

that I don’t think is documented anywhere. So I’m writing a blog post about it. I hope readers from Planet GNOME can help figure out where it needs to be documented.

For an object (let’s call it FooLabel) that’s part of the public API of a library (let’s call it libfoo), creating the object via its foo_label_new() constructor function should be equivalent to creating it via g_object_new().

If foo_label_new() takes no arguments then it should literally be only this:

FooLabel *
foo_label_new(void)
{
    return g_object_new(FOO_TYPE_LABEL, NULL);
}

If it does take arguments, then they should correspond to construct properties, and they should get set in the g_object_new() call. (It’s customary to at least put all construct-only properties as arguments to the constructor function.) For example:

FooLabel *
foo_label_new(const char *text)
{
    return g_object_new(FOO_TYPE_LABEL,
        "text", text,
        NULL);
}

Do not put any other code in foo_label_new(). That is, don’t do this:

FooLabel *
foo_label_new(void)
{
    FooLabel *retval = g_object_new(FOO_TYPE_LABEL, NULL);
    retval->priv->some_variable = 5;  /* Don't do this! */
    return retval;
}

The reason for that is because callers of your library will expect to be able to create FooLabels using g_object_new() in many situations. This is done when creating a FooLabel in JS and Python, but also when creating one from a Glade file, and also in plain old C when you need to set construct properties. In all those situations, the private field some_variable will not get initialized to 5!

Instead, put the code in foo_label_init(). That way, it will be executed regardless of how the object is constructed. And if you need to write code in the constructor that depends on construct properties that have been set, use the constructed virtual function. There’s a code example here.

If you want more details about what function is called when, Allison Lortie has a really useful blog post.

This trap can be easy to fall into in Vala. Using a construct block is the right way to do it:

namespace Foo {
public class Label : GLib.Object {
    private int some_variable;

    construct {
        some_variable = 5;
    }
}
}

This is the wrong way to do it:

namespace Foo {
public class Label : GLib.Object {
    private int some_variable;

    public Label() {
        some_variable = 5;  // Don't do this!
    }
}
}

This is tricky because the wrong way seems like the most obvious way to me!

This has been a public service announcement for the GNOME community, but here’s where you come in! Please help figure out where this should be documented, and whether it’s possible to enforce it through automated tools.

For example, the Writing Bindable APIs page seems like a good place to warn about it, and I’ve already added it there. But this should probably go into Vala documentation in the appropriate place. I have no idea if this is a problem with Rust’s gobject_gen! macro, but if it is then it should be documented as well.

Documented pitfalls are better than undocumented pitfalls, but removing the pitfall altogether is better. Is there a way we can check this automatically?

Announcing Flapjack

Here’s a post about a tool that I’ve developed at work. You might find it useful if you contribute to any desktop platform libraries that are packaged as a Flatpak runtime, such as GNOME or KDE.

Flatpak is a system for delivering desktop applications that was pioneered by the GNOME community. At Endless, we have jumped aboard the Flatpak train. Our product Endless OS is a Linux distribution, but not a traditional one in the sense of being a collection of packages that you install with a package manager; it’s an immutable OS image, with atomic updates delivered through OSTree. Applications are sandboxed-only and Flatpak-only.

Flatpak makes the lives of application developers much easier, who want to get their applications to users without having to care which Linux distribution those users use. It means that as an application developer, I don’t have to fire up three different virtual machines and email five packaging contributors whenever I make a release of my application. (Or, in theory it would work that way if I would stop using deprecated libraries in my application!)

This is what flapjacks are in the UK, Ireland, Isle of Man, and Newfoundland. Known as “granola bars” or “oat bars” elsewhere. By Alistair Young, CC BY 2.0, https://commons.wikimedia.org/w/index.php?curid=5331306

On my work computer I took the leap and now develop everything on an immutable OSTree system just like it would be running in production. I now develop everything inside a Flatpak sandbox. However, while Flatpak works great when packaging some code that already exists, it is a bit lacking in the developer experience.

For app developers, Carlos Soriano has written a tool called flatpak-dev-cli based on a workflow designed by Thibault Saunier of the Pitivi development team. This has proven very useful for developing Flatpak apps.

But a lot of the work I do is not on apps, but on the library stack that is used by apps on Endless OS. In fact, my team’s main product is a Flatpak runtime. I wanted an analogue of flatpak-dev-cli for developing the libraries that live inside a Flatpak runtime.

Flapjack

…while this is what flapjacks are everywhere else in Canada, and in the US. Also known as “pancakes.” By Belathee Photography, CC BY-SA 3.0, https://commons.wikimedia.org/w/index.php?curid=15167594

Flapjack is that tool. It’s a wrapper around Flatpak-builder that is intended to replace JHBuild in the library developer’s toolbox.

For several months I’ve been using it in my day-to-day work, on a system running Endless OS (which has hardly any developer tools installed by default.) It only requires Flatpak-builder, Git, and Python.

In Flapjack’s README I included a walkthrough for reproducing Tristan’s trick from his BuildStream talk at GUADEC 2017 where he built an environment with a modified copy of GTK that showed all the UI labels upside-down.

That walkthrough is pretty much what my day-to-day development workflow looks like now. As an example, a recent bug required me to patch eos-knowledge-lib and xapian-glib at the same time, which are both components of Endless’s Modular Framework runtime. I did approximately this:

flapjack open xapian-glib
flapjack open eos-knowledge-lib
cd checkout/xapian-glib
# ... make changes to code ...
flapjack test xapian-glib
# ... keep changing and repeating until the tests pass!
cd ../eos-knowledge-lib
# ... make more changes to code ...
flapjack test eos-knowledge-lib
# ... keep changing and repeating until the tests pass!
flapjack build
# ... keep changing and repeating until the whole runtime builds!
flapjack run com.endlessm.encyclopedia.en
# run Encyclopedia, which is an app that uses this runtime, to check
# that my fix worked
git checkout -b etc. etc.
# create branches for my work and push them

I also use Flapjack’s “devtools manifest” to conveniently provide developer tools that aren’t present in Endless OS’s base OSTree layer. In Flapjack’s readme I gave an example of adding the jq tool to the devtools manifest, but I also have cppcheck, RR, and a bunch of Python modules that I added with flatpak-pip-generator. Whenever I need to use any of these tools, I just open flapjack shell and they’re available!

Questions you might ask

Why is it called Flapjack?

The working title was jokingly chosen to mess up your muscle memory if you were used to typing flatpak, but it stuck and became the real name. If it does annoy you, you can alias it to fj or something.

Flatpak-builder is old news, why does Flapjack not use BuildStream?

I would like it if that were the case! I suspect that BuildStream would solve my main problem with Flapjack, which is that it is slow. In fact I started out writing Flapjack as a wrapper around BuildStream, instead of Flatpak-builder. But at the time BuildStream just didn’t have enough documentation for me to get my head around it quickly enough. I hear that this is changing and I would welcome a port to BuildStream!

As well, it was not possible to allow --socket=x11 during a build like you can with Flatpak-builder, so I couldn’t get it to run unit tests for modules that depended on GTK.

Why are builds with Flapjack so slow?

The slowest parts are caching each build step (I suspect here is where using BuildStream would help a lot) and exporting the runtime’s debug extension to the local Flatpak repository. For the latter, this used to be even slower, before my colleague Emmanuele Bassi suggested to use a “bare-user” repository. I’m still looking for a way to speed this up. I suspect it should be possible, since for Flapjack builds we would probably never care about the Flatpak repository history.

Can I use Flapjack to develop system components like GNOME Shell?

No. There still isn’t a good developer story for working on system components on an immutable OS! At Endless, the people who work on those components will generally replace their OSTree file system with a mutable one. This isn’t a very good strategy because it means you’re developing on a system that is different from what users are running in production, but I haven’t found any better way so far.

Epilogue

Thanks to my employer Endless for allowing me to reserve some time to write this tool in a way that it would be useful for the wider Flatpak community, rather than just internally.

That’s about it! I hope Flapjack is useful for you. If you have any other questions, feel free to ask me.

Where to find it

Flapjack’s page on PyPI: https://pypi.python.org/pypi/flapjack
The code on GitHub: https://github.com/endlessm/flapjack
Report bugs and request features: https://github.com/endlessm/flapjack/issues