1028718 - need async loader/sandbox api, deprecate old one (e10s)

Status: RESOLVED WONTFIX

(Add-on SDK Graveyard :: General, defect, P1)

Description

[Tomislav Jovanovic :zombie]

the current loader/sandbox api is synchronous, and doesn't abstract the raw sandbox returned from platform, thus making it incompatible with e10s.

this isn't to actually change the implementation to be e10s compatible, just:

1) provide to an async api, 
2) switch to it internally, and 
3) deprecate the old one ASAP

to give addon authors time to switch to the new one.

Comment 1

[Tomislav Jovanovic :zombie]

> 2) switch to it internally, and 

this might be a bigger thing, and escalate to async content/sandbox and possibly even content/worker, which would warrant a separate bug.

or as they already do most stuff using events, it might all be "just fine".. must investigate.

Comment 2

[Jeff Griffiths (:canuckistani) (:⚡︎)]

(In reply to Tomislav Jovanovic [:zombie] from comment #0)
...
> 1) provide to an async api, 


We'll obviously need a JEP for what the new api looks like.

Comment 3

[Jeff Griffiths (:canuckistani) (:⚡︎)]

cc'ing dcamp because this could also impact devtools code.

Comment 4

[Erik Vold [:erikvold] (please needinfo? me)]

I have some notes from Irving about some loader changes that he wanted for telemetry recordings.  Mainly promise based methods so that one can record when the async loading/unloading process starts and ends accurately.

We should jep this.

Comment 5

[Jordan Santell [:jsantell] [@jsantell]]

Curious about this, is this referring to a new, non-commonJS loader?

Comment 6

[Tomislav Jovanovic :zombie]

(In reply to Jordan Santell [:jsantell] [@jsantell] from comment #5)
> Curious about this, is this referring to a new, non-commonJS loader?

no, this is an existing low-level module in loader/sandbox.js that is used for creating a sandbox for loading our content scripts, which in e10s can't be done synchronously, thus the need for the api change.

Comment 7

[Tomislav Jovanovic :zombie]

Attachment: Link to Github pull-request: https://github.com/mozilla/addon-sdk/pull/1539

not actually a patch ready for review, work in progress..

Comment 8

[Tomislav Jovanovic :zombie]

as explained in bug 1058698, this approach wont work because of platform changes. the alternative solution in bug 1058698 has landed, and this should have been closed long ago..