Submitted PR#2 for code review, the append method for the Headers API. The code compiles on our machines locally but seems to fail Travis CI on github. Our coach @jdm also gave us a lot of good feedback which we are working through.
Spent the afternoon brushing up on Rust!
Things we learned:
Debugging: Rust is a compiled language, so code needs to be built before running it. This means that you can get errors at two different stages, compile-time and runtime. As opposed to an interpreted language like Python where errors are found as each line of code is executed in order (top-to-bottom), Rust code is parsed in its entirety during compilation and different types of errors are found in stages. Python debugging is like a straight celery stick, and Rust debugging is more like an onion, with layers. One side-effect of this is that when we build Servo, the errors do not appear in a “linear” fashion, and fixing one bug at line 20 does not mean that lines 1-19 are perfect.
Reflectors! For the past two weeks we have been mystified by the presence of Reflectors in Servo DOM objects. Today we learned that Reflectors are JS objects allocated by SpiderMonkey (Mozilla’s JS engine), that “reflect” the containing Rust object. An example of its use is here. This concept is hard to digest at first because it is circular: the JS reflector is embedded within the Rust DOM object, yet has a reference to the DOM object.
TODO:
Address all the feedback from PR#2, including a lot of refactoring and adding a new_inherited method (somewhat related to Reflectors).
Should we write tests for our append method and associated helper functions?
Come to a conclusion regarding the field-content production, i.e. here.
