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Spidermonkey and Firefox Nightly Reports
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Spidermonkey Development Blog: 5 Things You Might Not Know about Developing Self-Hosted Code
Self-hosted code is JavaScript code that SpiderMonkey uses to implement some of its intrinsic functions for JavaScript. Because it is written in JavaScript, it gets all the benefits of our JITs, like inlining and inline caches.
Even if you are just getting started with self-hosted code, you probably already know that it isn’t quite the same as your typical, day-to-day JavaScript. You’ve probably already been pointed at the SMDOC, but here are a couple tips to make developing self-hosted code a little easier.
1. When you change self-hosted code, you need to build
When you make changes to SpiderMonkey’s self-hosted JavaScript code, you will not automatically see your changes take effect in Firefox or the JS Shell.
SpiderMonkey’s self-hosted code is split up into multiple files and functions to make it easier for developers to understand, but at runtime, SpiderMonkey loads it all from a single, compressed data stream. This means that all those files are gathered together into a single script file and compressed at build time.
To see your changes take effect, you must remember to build!
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Firefox Nightly: A Tab Groups Scoop – These Weeks in Firefox: Issue 179
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