548341 - API for privileged access to internals

Status: RESOLVED WONTFIX

(Core :: JavaScript Engine, defect)

Description

[Dave Herman [:dherman]]

API's such as ephemeron tables (see bug #547941) need to hide access to internal information that's nonetheless necessary to expose for testing. Propose a simple drop-box API for any special privileged observations that should be conditionally compiled in only for the test harness.

Simple patch with boilerplate forthcoming.

Comment 1

[Dave Herman [:dherman]]

Attachment: boilerplate for Internals API

Comment 2

[Brendan Eich [:brendan]]

Comment on attachment 428754 [details] [diff] [review]
boilerplate for Internals API

Not sure this helps if we have to --enable-internals for shell builds. Is that on by default?

Andreas should review.

Please fix copied Netscape 1998 license comment boilerplate to use Mozilla Foundation and current year -- exact details matter, again Andreas knows (thanks to Reed, our anal-retentive license comment policy gourmet).

/be

Comment 3

[Dave Herman [:dherman]]

My thought was that it should only be enabled for running tests, but not for public users of the shell and certainly not in the browser. Tests can object-detect and disable themselves:

if (Internals) {
  // run the test...
}

so at least that way we can avoid death when JS_HAS_INTERNALS is #ifdef'ed off.

I'll fix the license ASAP and resubmit the patch.

Comment 4

[Dave Herman [:dherman]]

Attachment: boilerplate for Internals API

corrected license, a couple trivial cleanups

Comment 5

[Dave Herman [:dherman]]

This isn't worth it. The shell already has lots of these kinds of extra observations implemented in the global object in js.cpp; we can just keep doing that. That's what we should do for bug #547941, too.

Dave

Comment 6

[Brendan Eich [:brendan]]

(In reply to comment #3)
> My thought was that it should only be enabled for running tests, but not for
> public users of the shell and certainly not in the browser. Tests can
> object-detect and disable themselves:
> 
> if (Internals) {
>   // run the test...
> }

if (this.Internals), of course ;-).

Yeah, I did not point out the shell testing hacks we've added over the years, since your approach here seemed better for embeddings other than the shell that might also want "internals". But we can keep hacking the shell.

/be