Gabriele Svelto Profile picture
Old school nerd. Knows things about computers that would drive you insane. You can find me on Mastodon too: @gabrielesvelto@fosstodon.org
Aug 12, 2022 29 tweets 6 min read
Since people have been asking how I pulled this off here's a thread describing how I modified Firefox' memory allocator locking on macOS to improve responsiveness. 🧵1/27 Firefox uses a highly customized version of jemalloc across all architectures. We've diverged significantly from upstream jemalloc in order to guarantee optimal performance and memory usage on Firefox 2/27
Dec 14, 2021 18 tweets 4 min read
I'm taking this as an example to discuss why you should consider rewriting in Rust even stuff that already works and is relatively feature-complete 🧵 1/ For starters robustness and ease of maintenance: no software is really finished, especially if the data it works on can change albeit slowly. Maintaining a Rust codebase is a lot simpler than a C++ one. You'll have a lot less surprises when it's fed unexpected inputs. 2/
Oct 6, 2020 17 tweets 9 min read
Over the past few months @mozilla we worked on improving #Firefox stability on #Linux. This effort quickly became an example of good synergies between #FOSS projects. A short thread 👇 When Firefox crashes the user can send us a crash report which we use to analyze the problem and hopefully fix it. However to extract useful information from the report we need the debug information from the affected build and its dependencies