Not MIA, just BUSY

I'm still fighting with the server firmware to get uppsala's second core (which I paid good money for) turned back on, but in the meantime 31 is coming along; the patches are down and JavaScript at least builds and passes tests with the new generational garbage collector. However, changes made to accommodate the MIPS port and some other tweaks have degraded our JIT performance, so I need to pump that back up before continuing. Then we'll continue with the rest of the browser.

At the same time I'm looking ahead to see how feasible the ascent to 38ESR will be. Even money says that Mozilla and Google drop 10.6 support (and quite possibly 10.7 support) sometime in 2015, but if we can stall them to drop it for 38 but not remove any of the code like they did for 16-17 when 10.5 support was removed then we can probably make it. At that point we would exit the 38ESR support cycle in late 2016 when the youngest Power Mac will be turning 10 years old. If we have to drop source parity then, it would certainly not be in shame.

For JavaScript in Fx32 Mozilla has implemented irregexp, V8's regular expression engine, and dumped WebKit's YARR which was dragging down benchmarks. I was initially very worried we would need to implement yet a third JIT ourselves, but to my great delight it looks like Mozilla's adaptation uses the existing macroassemblers, so we just need to make sure there are no endian problems in it.

And more good news, this time for Linux/ppc users; at last there's apparently a solution to the infamous bug 961488. If it works, we'll see if it can be uplifted so you won't be out of commission for too long.