Featherweight Musings

I'm a research engineer at Mozilla working on the Rust compiler. I have history with Firefox layout and graphics, and programming language theory and type systems (mostly of the OO, Featherweight flavour, thus the title of the blog). http://www.ncameron.org @nick_r_cameron

Saturday, December 15, 2012

Leaving Auckland

We are moving again; back to Christchurch. Hopefully this time to fewer earthquakes and more normalcy. I will continue my tradition of writ...

Friday, December 14, 2012

How To Win Benchmarks And Influence People

ParticleAcceleration is a Microsoft demo. If you follow the link, you'll see lots of little spheres arranged in a big sphere, rotating...

Wednesday, November 28, 2012

Forcing active layers

When implementing or debugging layers stuff it is often useful to force a layer to be active - active layers have different behaviour from ...

Sunday, October 14, 2012

Thebes canvas is dead

Azure canvas was turned on by default on all platforms for Firefox 18 (now on Aurora). And so we have finally removed Thebes canvas from Fi...

Monday, September 17, 2012

HTML 5 Canvas Radial Gradients

Some of the trickiest bugs getting Azure canvas working were with radial gradients. Radial gradients in canvases are very flexible, more so ...

Saturday, September 15, 2012

Orcon - why you so useless?

This is actually a rant about software design, but that won't become apparent until later... I have been an Orcon (an internet/phone p...

Sunday, September 09, 2012

More on the Layers refactoring

The refactoring is coming along nicely, I think the hard work is done - I have a set of abstractions I'm happy with, and most of the cod...

Thursday, September 06, 2012

Azure canvas on by default

As of tonight, Azure canvas is on by default on all platforms! The last platform to get turned on was Linux, for which Anthony Jones did a l...

Wednesday, August 29, 2012

Layers refactoring

OMTC is one of the major performance wins for Firefox at the moment and we want to bring it to all platforms. The major sub-system involved ...

Friday, August 10, 2012

Azure/Cairo canvas - progress

For those following along at home, as of this morning Azure/Cairo canvas is on for Android (and Firefox OS (b2g), presumably) on inbound (bu...

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