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0 pointsbogwog3y ago0 comments

> Surely it is Firefox' team's responsibility to use system calls in a sane way, say not almost 50x more than the competition?

The docs for that function don't say anything about performance: https://learn.microsoft.com/en-us/windows/win32/api/memoryap...

They also don't say anything about "sane" usage, and while I don't have an MBA, I'm pretty sure they don't teach anything about `VirtualProtect` ratios when doing competitor analysis.

One possibility is that the Chrome team's implementation was more efficient due to luck, or they invested the resources to identify the performance characteristics of this function call, whereas the Firefox team missed it. I don't think "Chrome has more development resources than Firefox" is news to anybody.

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shadowgovt3y ago

There are three facets to any protocol, API, or standard in software:

The spec, the intent of the spec, and the implementation of the spec.

Doesn't matter what the docs say; what matters is what performance testing shows. Docs lie.

And even if Chrome lucked into a cheaper implementation: that luck has given them a market edge.

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