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

Tuesday, January 28, 2014

Another 'fun' bug

Time for another bug story - this one was fun because it is a combination of programmer (me) error and a compiler error (specifically a PGO...

Wednesday, January 15, 2014

A rough guide to DXR

DXR is a web-based cross-reference tool created by Mozilla. It allows for code search, navigation, and comprehension. It is a semantic to...

Wednesday, December 04, 2013

OMTC for Windows nightly users

I just landed a patch flipping the switch for all Windows users with HWA (d3d9/10/11) to use off-main-thread compositing. This is a fairly ...

Tuesday, November 26, 2013

No more main-thread OpenGL in Firefox (important note for Linux users who use OpenGL)

Main-thread compositing with OpenGL is no more (bug 924403). The only option for OpenGL compositing is off-main-thread compositing (OMTC). ...

Sunday, November 10, 2013

Iterative Development

Modern software engineering 'theory' is all about iterative. Each new development seems to be more iterative than the last (contras...

Friday, November 01, 2013

Paris work week

I just returned from another work week, this time in Paris. Coming after the summit and some personal travel it has been a particularly exh...

Wednesday, October 30, 2013

Syntax IS important

In the domains of programming language theory and design I often see it stated that 'syntax is not important'. Syntax is believed t...

Thursday, October 10, 2013

Summit 2013

Last weekend was the Mozilla summit. I attended the Toronto event. It was awesome. Also: exhausting, fun, informative, interesting, inspiri...

Monday, September 09, 2013

A real-life Heisenbug

I spent three or four days debugging (a while ago now, this blog post has been aging for longer than expected in my blog cellar) an interes...

Saturday, September 07, 2013

An ode to Sublime Text

I use Sublime Text as my editor for about 80% of the work I do (sometimes on Windows I use Visual Studio because I use it for debugging and...

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