Top all-time · #2055
glandium.org
Personal blog · glandium.org/blogprogrammingsystems
glandium.org is a personal blog at glandium.org about programming and systems. Since 2010, 36 different Hacker News readers have linked it 55 times, most often “Firefox nightly is now built with clang LTO on all platforms”. It is still writing: the last post was on 2025-04-30, and you can follow it by feed.
Too few sampled comments (18) to say how often HN recommends it.?
Why HN links it
HN readers link glandium.org for Mozilla and Firefox build and tooling notes, glibc memory allocator behaviour, git-cinnabar, and Clang/LLVM build posts. Most links are cited as sources.
- Recommended for · 3 comments
- Called the graphs in one post "nice", the site a "trusted source" of Mozilla command line information, and one post a "better link" than the submission.
Summarised by Claude from a sample of 18 HN comments that link here. Each comment is marked recommending, critical or neutral (citing without judging); how this works.
Most-linked posts?
- Firefox nightly is now built with clang LTO on all platforms5 people · 5 mentions · first linked 2018-09-12
- RIP Iceweasel, 13 Nov 2006 – 10 Mar 20164 people · 4 mentions · first linked 2016-03-10
- Reproducing the Linux Builds of Firefox 683 people · 3 mentions · first linked 2019-07-11
- I (kind of) killed Mercurial at Mozilla3 people · 3 mentions · first linked 2023-11-21
- When the allocator works against you: memory fragmentation in Python on glibc2 people · 3 mentions · first linked 2018-12-08
- /blog/?p=36312 people · 2 mentions · first linked 2016-02-07
- Standing Up the Cross-Compilation of Firefox for Windows on Linux2 people · 2 mentions · first linked 2020-03-06
- Hacking the ELF format for Firefox, 12 years later; doing better with less2 people · 2 mentions · first linked 2023-08-30
- The influence of hardware on Firefox build times2 people · 2 mentions · first linked 2020-05-28
- Reducing Firefox startup I/O on Linux.2 people · 2 mentions · first linked 2011-01-04
What Hacker News says?
(I work at Mozilla, but not on the VCS tooling, or this transition) To give a bit of additional context here, since the link doesn't have any: The Firefox code has indeed recently moved from having its canonical home on mercurial at hg.mozilla.org to GitHub. This only affects the code; bugzilla is still being used for issue tracking, phabricator for code review and landing, and our taskcluster system for CI. In the…
Comment linking /blog/?p=4346
on “Mozilla Firefox – Official GitHub repo”Submitted PSA: Firefox Nightly now with experimental Wayland support as a story · 288 points
HN discussionIt's opt-in at runtime. https://glandium.org/blog/?p=3899 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=18465506 And because that can cause problems when spawning third party applications from Firefox, there's another environment variable to opt-in in last nightly: https://bugzilla.mozilla.org/show_bug.cgi?id=1522780
Comment linking /blog/?p=3899
on “Firefox 65.0 released”Submitted Firefox nightlies for Linux are now using Gtk+3 as a story · 166 points
HN discussionThese builds still have distribution-specific in-built API keys for some of the built-in services such as Google Safebrowsing, Google Location Services and Mozilla Location Services. See [1], [2], [3], [4], [5] and [6] for details and examples. Additionally, upon first launch of Firefox, a unique client identifier is created, and this is sent to Mozilla by default probably before you get a chance to disable telemetr…
Comment linking /blog/?p=3923
on “Each Firefox download has a unique identifier”Submitted Firefox nightly is now built with clang LTO on all platforms as a story · 122 points
HN discussionThe glibc memory allocator DOES have pathological cases that lead to what can look like memory leaks. See https://glandium.org/blog/?p=3698 https://glandium.org/blog/?p=3723 https://sourceware.org/bugzilla/show_bug.cgi?id=23416 (despite being rather old, it's also still a problem)
Comment linking /blog/?p=3723
on “Make Ubuntu packages 90% faster by rebuilding them”Submitted When the memory allocator works against you as a story · 89 points
HN discussionFull support for contributing to Firefox via git is coming: http://glandium.org/blog/?p=3413
Comment linking /blog/?p=3413
on “Mozilla Research Projects”Submitted Extreme tab browsing as a story · 40 points
HN discussionThe effect is very dependent on program structure and actual code running, but for a suitable application it's reasonable to expect anything from 5-15%, and sometimes much more (see e.g. Firefox reporting 18% here: https://glandium.org/blog/?p=3888 )
Comment linking /blog/?p=3888
on “Rust 1.37.0”Submitted Firefox is now built with clang LTO on all platforms as a story · 29 points
HN discussionI just read this https://glandium.org/blog/?p=3631
Comment linking /blog/?p=3631
on “SSH: Best practices”Submitted Reproducing the Linux Builds of Firefox 68 as a story · 19 points
HN discussionI had one a long time ago, from before ssh -W, which I updated for the occasion: Host <asterisk>+<asterisk> ProxyCommand ssh -W $(echo %h | sed 's/^.<asterisk>+//') $(echo %h | sed 's/+[^+]<asterisk>$//;s/\([^+%%]<asterisk>\)%%\([^+]<asterisk>\)$/\2 -l \1/;s/:\([^:+]<asterisk>\)$/ -p \1/') Use with: $ ssh login1%host1:port1+login2%host2:port2+login3%host3:port3+host4:port4 -l login4 https://glandium.org/blog/?p=3631…
Comment linking /blog/?p=3631
on “SSH: Best practices”Submitted Attempting to track I/O with systemtap as a story · 7 points
HN discussionSupporting Windows is often a pain (although in this case Rust hides a lot of that pain, honestly), but the main driver of the original sccache implementation was not Windows support, but the ability to share the compilation cache across our many ephemeral build machines. My colleague Mike Hommey (who wrote the first implemenation) has some nice graphs demonstrating this in his original blog posts on the topic: http…
Comment linking /blog/?p=3079
on “Sccache, Mozilla’s distributed compiler cache, now written in Rust”Submitted RIP Iceweasel, 13 Nov 2006 – 10 Mar 2016 as a story · 5 points
HN discussionThis situation has been resolved recently - https://glandium.org/blog/?p=3622
Comment linking /blog/?p=3622
on ““@ubuntu asks us to bill you 1e-2e per month for each VPS/PCI/PCC/SD””Submitted Firefox Git Migration, the unofficial guide as a story · 4 points
HN discussionMach-O also has a more compact bytecode-like representation for relocations, while ELF just wastes tons of space. See https://glandium.org/blog/?p=1177
Comment linking /blog/?p=1177
on “ELF files on Linux”Submitted I (kind of) killed Mercurial at Mozilla as a story · 3 points
HN discussionGlandium is a trusted source of Mozilla command line information. https://glandium.org/about/
Comment linking /about/
on “Simplifying Firefox Release Channels”Submitted Reproducing the Linux Builds of Firefox 68 as a story · 3 points
HN discussionHere is the source blog post (and a better link imho): https://glandium.org/blog/?p=3888
Comment linking /blog/?p=3888
on “Firefox nightly is now built with clang LTO on all platforms”Submitted Git now faster than Mercurial to clone Mozilla Mercurial repos as a story · 3 points
HN discussionPython uses its own allocator for small sizes (below 512 bytes if I remember correctly). I've had a similar problem to yours. See https://glandium.org/blog/?p=3698 and the followup https://glandium.org/blog/?p=3723 . I have a glibc bug open about the issue https://sourceware.org/bugzilla/show_bug.cgi?id=23416 .
Comment linking /blog/?p=3723
on “Fixing a Tough Memory Leak in Python”Submitted Debian GNU/Linux Is Switching to Firefox from Iceweasel as a story · 3 points
HN discussionAuthor here. FWIW, git-cinnabar is written in python because it uses the mercurial code to talk to mercurial servers, and the mercurial code is in python. Well, that was true when it was first released, but recent versions have gained "native" support to talk to mercurial servers (where a helper program written in C does the talking[1]), although the mercurial code is still used to read bundle2[2] data that comes fr…
Comment linking /blog/?p=3648
on “When the memory allocator works against you”Submitted Building a custom kernel for the Nexus S as a story · 3 points
HN discussion
