A few weeks ago I convinced myself that is possible to rewrite Mozilla to avoid COMPtrs on the stack. Since then I’ve changed my mind a few times and felt like I may not be able to get this rewrite working. However, after three or four false starts, I finally managed to work out a metal model of the stack nsCOMPtr usage. With a combination of automatic blacklisting of tricky code, manual demacroing and lots of help from Benjamin I got the generated 3.2MB patch to compile.

I am sure that there are lots of bugs to be found still, but at least we’ve discovered the pattern that the code follows. I am also sure that there are lots of unpleasant surprises to be discovered and dealt with in the near future.

The bright side is that the result of these rewrites we should get a less buggy codebase that is easier to work on, more efficient and compiles to smaller binaries. My other big wish is to significantly reduce the amount of C++ magic in the codebase.

I am happy that garburator works as it means I can go back to playing outparamdel. Hopefully, once garburator+outparamdel are applied on all possible methods we’ll end up with relatively nice looking C++ code and a healthy performance boost.