1618905 - Multi-language Architecture Design for Project FOG

Status: RESOLVED FIXED

(Toolkit :: Telemetry, task, P1)

Description

[Chris H-C :chutten]

Project FOG needs to support metrics instrumented in JS, C++, and Rust. Assuming that we have clever and performant ways to generate APIs for all those languages (see bug 1617590 for Rust and waiting on future Milestone 4's "C++ API Design" and "JS API Design" for the other two), we still have questions that need answering sooner rather than later:

• Where do the API implementations live? In what language are they written?
• What happens if the same metric is manipulated by more than one language?
  • What if a timespan is start()ed in JS but is stop()ed in Rust? Do we even want to try to support that?
• How will we unambiguously name these different concepts of support?
  • Is FOG/Firefox Desktop a platform? A target? Unlike Android it has more than one language needing specific metrics APIs, and more than one OS it ships on, so we can no longer conflate support of a language with support of a os with support of a platform/target/whatever.
• How much does the Glean SDK and glean_parser need to change in order to support this proposed design?
• How does this support the existing Rust API Design (bug 1617590)?

Comment 1

[Jan-Erik Rediger [:janerik]]

Attachment: Proposal: Multi-language Architecture Design

The document still has gaps and doesn't go too deep into making decisions yet, but that's where I'd like to get some input from you, :chutten.

Comment 2

[Jan-Erik Rediger [:janerik]]

Comment on attachment 9131468 [details]
Proposal: Multi-language Architecture Design

I rewrote the whole first part of the multi-lang arch document and added a diagram to explain the different parts better.
Please take a look and leave feedback and/or f+ this proposal.
(I'd like to take out the question about naming to a separate discussion)

Comment 3

[Chris H-C :chutten]

Comment on attachment 9131468 [details]
Proposal: Multi-language Architecture Design

I like it. Especially the diagram.

Comment 4

[Alessio Placitelli [:Dexter]]

Comment on attachment 9131468 [details]
Proposal: Multi-language Architecture Design

The proposal looks good to me. I left a couple of minor comments in the document.

Comment 5

[Michael Droettboom [:mdroettboom]]

Comment on attachment 9131468 [details]
Proposal: Multi-language Architecture Design

This proposal looks like it's in great shape.

Comment 6

[Jan-Erik Rediger [:janerik]]

Proposal has been reviewed and accepted by the them. Some followup defined for the other API languages, but the high-level is clear.