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Comment by dblohm7 | Hacker News Reader

Note that this is across all platforms in the repository, so it is skewed relative to the build for a specific platform.

As an example, Java is in there for Android. There is also a lot of JavaScript that isn’t shared between desktop and Android.

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Thanks! I was wondering about that, especially why it had so much Java in it. My theory was that it was still there from the applet days, although it still seemed like a lot more java code than I would expect since the local JVM did the executing.

Dang, this is making me a little nostalgic. I actually really enjoyed writing Java Applets. I'm sure if I went back to some of my old codebases though I'd be thanking my lucky stars for React and LiveView.

Also, this includes ASM by lines of code, and ASM has very short lines, so it's arguably over-represented (although LOC is a very vague metric anyways).

I wonder how much of that ASM is for JIT compilation, and how much is for stuff like fast media decoding.

Thanks, I was wondering about Java in the context of desktop Firefox. I think at least the latest Firefox on Android is mostly Kotlin and uses Gecko components which might use some glue Java code.

Firefox to my knowledge doesn't use much kotlin. Checking searchfox it seems the only uses of kotlin are in some geckoview tests, while the Android frontend including geckoview are still plain old .java.

The one other place I know of (other than android stuff) where java is used is the html parser (tokenizer really), which is written in java and then used to generate a C++ version.

I was thinking about https://github.com/mozilla-mobile/fenix - bunch of Kotlin there.

This is incorrect. The front-end for Fenix uses the Fenix and Android-components GitHub repos.

mozilla-central only contains GeckoView (the embedding API for Android) which uses Java for the API itself and Kotlin for all the unit tests.

You and blinkingled are both right of course. I totally blanked out that the mobile frontend code is now in it's own repository and indeed mostly kotlin.

Being in a different repository, it didn't show up in OP's stats, either.

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