My v0.4 release is over and done with. In that release I mainly focused on bug 459727 but for my v0.5 release I’ll be taking a look at a problem with hg annotate, bug 459823. The problem here is that hg annotate takes FOREVER to load large files such as ten thousand line cpp files found in mozilla-central. People have already spent a bit of time working on this bug so this gives me some insight intto what I’m required to do.
I had a chat with jorendorff and we discussed what should happen when using hg annotate:
- Show the first screenful in a second or less
- Don’t lock up the browser while the rest loads
- Don’t take forever to load the rest of the file, because I often want to search for a snippet of code
This is an interesting task for me as I’ve never really looked at how firefox renders things on the page. In order to make hg annotate load things faster I’ll have to look at what is more efficient. For example would a page with a table of 10,000+ rows load faster or a page with 10,000+ divs? Right now, I don’t know but I’ll have to find out because as jorendorff put it “the current code just fails all day long” and something must be done about that.