Google Reader's Launch Was 10 Years Ago #

Google Reader was launched 10 years ago ago today. Though it did not live to see its 10th birthday, pieces of it still live on. Specifically FRBE (Feed Reader Backend) was Reader's backend, but over time it evolved into a reusable piece of Google infrastructure, powering the Feed API, Blogger's following feature and many other things. Thanks to an anonymous source within Google, it's possible to see that this bit of Reader is still up and serving requests.

frbe tasks in borg cells

WKWebView Communication Latency Revisited #

Earlier this year I posted about WKWebView communication latency and how it’s not quite as good as UIWebView (when using WKScriptMessageHandler, the officially sanctioned mechanism). There have a been a few developments in this area, so an update seems warranted.

Things appear to be promising for iOS 9: In late June Mark Lam fixed ScriptMessageHandlerDelegate::didPostMessage to reuse JSContext instances across calls. Now that I had an Apple engineer to bug appeal to, I filed a bug asking for same fix to be applied to [WKWebView evaluateJavaScript:completionHandler:], to help with execution round trips. Mark kindly obliged, and the fix was picked up (merged?) for iOS 9 beta 4.

Earlier, in April, Ted Suzman emailed me to ask if I’d considered modifying document.title to send data from the JS side (since it’s mirrored on the native side as the title property on the WKWebView, which can be observed via KVO). I implemented this approach and it seemed to work quite well. Ted also suggested trying location.replace (instead setting location.hash), which (though it should be equivalent) ends up being slightly faster for both UIWebView and WKWebView (implementation).

Ted’s messages got me thinking about other WKWebView properties that could be manipulated from the JS side, and so I took a closer look at the delegate protocols. The webView:runJavaScriptAlertPanelWithMessage:initiatedByFrame:completionHandler: method on WKUIDelegate caught my eye. We don’t use window.alert() in Quip, but this seemed like it would provide a way of getting a string from JS to native with minimal overhead (as previously mentioned, Quip encodes all JS ↔ native communications as strings already, so we don’t want the web view to do any other serialization for us). Better yet webView:runJavaScriptTextInputPanelWithPrompt:defaultText:initiatedByFrame:completionHandler: (which maps to window.prompt()) allows the native side to return a value to the JS side. I implemented these two approaches too.

Here are the results from testing the various communication mechanisms using my test bed. Tests were run on iPad Air 2’s, one running iOS 8.4 and another running iOS 9.0 beta 5

Method/OS iOS 8.4 iOS 9.0 beta 5
UIWebView
location.hash 0.26 0.28
location.replace 0.18 0.18
WKWebView
WKScriptMessageHandler 2.94 0.63
location.hash 0.69 0.58
location.replace 0.46 0.51
document.title 0.57 0.63
window.alert() 0.42 0.46
window.prompt() 0.37 0.45
JS execution round-trip
UIWebView 0.17 0.16
WKWebView 2.60 0.39

Quip is still using UIWebView since we’re still supporting iOS 7 (and supporting both web views did not seem like it would be worth the complexity). However, once iOS 9 is released we will most likely drop iOS 7 support, so it’s good to know that switching to WKWebView will not pose an unreasonable latency burden (though it remains to be seen if the selective swizzling and subview spelunking that we do will carry over).

Teaching the Closure Compiler About React #

tl;dr: react-closure-compiler is a project that contains a custom Closure Compiler pass that understands React concepts like components, elements and mixins. It allows you to get type-aware checks within your components and compile React itself alongside your code with full minification.

Late last year, Quip started a gradual migration to React for our web UI (incidentally the chat features that were launched recently represent the first major functionality to be done entirely using React). When I started my research into the feasibility of using React, one of my questions was “Does it work with the Closure Compiler?” At Quip we rely heavily on it not just for minification, but also for type annotations to make refactorings less scary and code more self-documenting¹, and for its many warnings to prevent other gotchas in JavaScript development. The tidbits that I found were encouraging, though a bit sparse:

  • An externs file with type declarations for most of React's API²
  • A Quora post by Pete Hunt (a React core contributor) describing React as “closure compiler compatible”
  • React's documentation about refs mentions making sure to quote refs annotated via string attributes³

In general I got the impression that it was certainly possible to use React with the Closure Compiler, but that not a lot of people were, and thus I would be off the beaten path⁴.

My first attempt was to add react.js (the unminified version) as source input along with a simple “hello world” component⁵. The rationale behind doing it this way was that, if React was to be a core library, it should be included in the main JavaScript bundle that we serve to our users, instead of being a separate file. It also wouldn't need an externs file, since the compiler was aware of it. Finally, since it was going to be minified with the rest of our code, I could use the non-minified version as the input, and get better error messages. I was then greeted by hundreds of errors and warnings which broadly fell into three categories:

  1. “illegal use of unknown JSDoc tag providesModule” and similar warnings about JSDoc tags that the React source uses that the Closure Compiler didn't understand
  2. “variable React is undeclared” indicating that the Closure compiler did not realize what symbols react.js exported, most likely because the module wrapper that it uses is a bit convoluted, and thus it's not obvious that the exported symbols are in the global scope
  3. “dangerous use of the global this object” within my component methods, since the Closure Compiler did not realize that the functions within the spec passed to React.createClass were going to be run as methods on the component instance.

Since I was still in a prototyping stage with React, I looked into the most minimal set of changes I could do to deal with these issues. For 2, adding the externs file to our list helped, since the compiler now knew that there was a React symbol and its many properties. This did seem somewhat wrong, since the React source was not actually external, and it was in fact safe to (globally) rename createClass and other methods, but it did quieten those errors. For 1 and 3 I wrote a small custom warnings guard that ignored all “errors” in the React source itself and the “dangerous use of global thiswarning in .jsx files.

Once I did all that, the code compiled, and appeared to run fine with all the other warnings and optimizations that we had. However, a few days later, as I was working on a more complex component, I ran into another error. Given:

var Comp = React.createClass({
    render: function() {...},
    someComponentMethod: function() {...}
});
var compInstance = React.render(React.createElement(Comp), ...);
compInstance.someComponentMethod();

I was told that someComponentMethod was not a known property on compInstance (which was of type React.ReactComponent — per the externs file). This once again boiled down to the compiler not understanding that the React.createClass construct (i.e. that it defined a type). It looked like I had two options for dealing with this:

  1. Add a @suppress {missingProperties} annotation at the callsite, so that the compiler wouldn't complain about the property that it didn't know about
  2. Add a @lends {React.ReactComponent.prototype} annotation to the class spec, so that the compiler would know that someComponentMethod was indeed a method on components (this seemed to be the approach taken by some other code I came across).

The main problem with 2 is that it then told the compiler that all component instances had a someComponentMethod method, which was not true. However, it seemed like the best option, so I added it and kept writing more components.

After a few more weeks, when more engineers started to write React code, these limitations started to chafe a bit. There was both the problem of having to teach others about how to handle sometimes cryptic error messages (@lends is not a frequently-encountered JSDoc tag), as well as genuine bugs that were missed because the compiler did not have a good enough understanding of the code patterns to flag them. Additionally, the externs file didn't quite match with the latest terminology (e.g. React.render's signature had it both taking and returning a ReactComponent). Finally, the use of an externs file meant that none of the React API calls were getting renamed, which was adding some bloat to our JavaScript.

After thinking about these limitations for a while, I began to explore the possibility of creating a custom Closure Compiler pass that would teach it about components, mixins, and other React concepts. It already had a custom pass that remapped goog.defineClass calls to class definitions, so teaching it about React.createClass didn't seem like too much of a stretch.

Fast forward a few weeks (and a baby) later, and react-closure-compiler is a GitHub project that implements this custom pass. It takes constructs of the form:

var Comp = React.createClass({
    render: function() {...},
    someComponentMethod: function() {...}
});

And transforms it to (before any of the normal compiler checks or type information was extracted):

/**
 * @interface
 * @extends {ReactComponent}
 */
function CompInterface() {}
CompInterface.prototype = {
    render: function() {},
    otherMethod: function() {}
};
/** @typedef {CompInterface} */
var Comp = React.createClass({
    /** @this {Comp} */
    render: function() {...},
    /** @this {Comp} */
    otherMethod: function() {...}
});
/** @typedef {ReactElement.<Comp>} */
var CompElement;

Things of note in the transformed code:

  • The CompInterface type is necessary in order to teach the compiler about all the methods that are present on the component. Having it as an @interface means that no extra code ends up being generated (and the existing code is left untouched). The methods in the interface are just stubs — they have the same parameters (and JSDoc is copied over, if any), but the body is empty.
  • The @typedef is added to the component variable so that user-authored code can treat that as the type (the interface is an implementation detail).
  • The @this annotations that are automatically added to all component methods means that the compiler understands that those functions do not run in the global scope.
  • The CompElement @typedef is designed to make adding types to elements for that component less verbose.

A bit more formally, these are the types that the compiler knows about given the Comp definition:

  • ReactClass.<Comp>, for the class definition
  • ReactElement.<Comp> for an element created from that definition (via JSX or React.createElement())
  • Comp for rendered instances of this component (this is subclass of ReactComponent).

This means that, for example, you can use {Comp} to as a @return, @param or @type annotation for functions that operate on rendered instances of Comp. Additionally, React.render invocations on JSX tags or explicit React.createElement calls are automatically annotated with the correct type.

To teach the compiler about the React API, I ended up having a types.js file with the full API definition (teaching the compiler how to parse the module boilerplate seemed too complex, and in any case the React code does not have type annotations for everything). For the actual type hierarchy, in addition to looking at the terminology in the React source itself, I also drew on the TypeScript and Flow type definitions for React. Note that this is not an externs file, it's injected into the React source itself (since it's inert, it does not result in any output changes). This means that all React API calls can be renamed (with the exception of React.createElement, which cannot be renamed due to the collision with the createElement DOM API that's in another externs file).

Having done the basics, I then turned to mixins (one of the reasons why we're not using ES6 class syntax for components). I ended up requiring that mixins be wrapped in a React.createMixin(...) call, which was introduced with React 0.13 (though it's not documented). This means that it's possible to cheaply understand mixins: [SomeMixin] declarations in the compiler pass without having to do more complex source analysis.

The README covers more of the uses and gotchas, but the summary is that Quip itself is using this compiler pass to pre-process all our client-side code. The process of converting our 400+ components (from the externs type annotations) took a couple of days (which included tweaks to the pass itself, as well as fixing a few bugs that the extra checks uncovered).

The nice thing about having custom code in the compiler is that it provides an easy point to inject more React-specific behavior. For example, we're heavy users of propTypes, but they're only useful when using the non-minified version of React — propTypes are not checked in minified production builds. The compiler pass can thus strip them if compiling with the minified version.

Flow was the obvious alternative to consider if we wanted static type checking that was React-aware. I also more recently came across Typed React. However, extending the Closure Compiler allows us to benefit from the hundreds of other (non-React) source files that have Closure Compiler type annotations. Additionally, the compiler is not just a checker, it is also a minifier, and some minification passes rely on type information, thus it is beneficial to have type information accessible to the compiler. One discovery that I made while working on this project is that the compiler has a pass that converts type expressions to JSDoc, and generally seems to have some understanding of type expressions that (at least superficially) resemble Flow's and TypeScript's. It would be nice to have one type annotated codebase that all three toolchains could be run on, but I think that's a significant undertaking at this point.

If you use React and the Closure Compiler together, please give the pass a try (it integrates with Plovr easily, and can otherwise be registered programatically) and let me know how it works out for you.

  1. I continue to find doing large-scale refactorings less scary in our client-side code than ones in our server-side Python code, despite better test coverage in the latter environment.
  2. I ended up contributing to it a bit, as we started to use less common React APIs.
  3. Spelunking through React's codebase that I did much later turned up keyOf and many other indicators that React was definitely developed with unquoted property renaming minification in mind.
  4. Indeed the original creator of the React externs file has indicated that he's no longer using the combination of React/Closure Compiler.
  5. Which used JSX, but that was not of interest to the Closure Compiler: it was transformed to plain JavaScript before the compiler saw it.

WKWebView Communication Latency #

One of the many exciting things about the modern WebKit API is that it has an officially sanctioned communication mechanism for doing JavaScript-to-native communication. Hacks should no longer be necessary to get data back out of the WKWebView. It is a simple matter of registering a WKScriptMessageHandler on the native side and then invoking it with window.webkit.messageHandlers.<handler name>.postMessage on the JS side.

After a heads-up from Jordan that messaging latency with the new web view was not that great, I extended the test bed I had developed to measure UIWebView communication mechanisms to also measure this setup. I got results that mirrored Jordan's experiences — on an iPad mini 2 (A7), UIWebView's best officially supported communication mechanism (changing location.hash¹) took 0.44ms, while the same round trip on a WKWebView took 3.63ms. I was expecting somewhat higher latency, since there is a cross-process IPC involved now, but not this much higher.

Curious as to what was going on, I pointed a profiler at the test harness, and got the following results.

Running Time         Symbol Name
4147.0ms   94.1%     Main Thread
                         10 stack frames elided
2165.0ms   49.1%             IPC::Connection::dispatchOneMessage()
2164.0ms   49.1%              IPC::Connection::dispatchMessage(…)
2161.0ms   49.0%               WebKit::WebProcessProxy::didReceiveMessage(…)
2160.0ms   49.0%                IPC::MessageReceiverMap::dispatchMessage(…)
2137.0ms   48.4%                 void IPC::handleMessage<…>
2137.0ms   48.4%                  WebKit::WebUserContentControllerProxy::didPostMessage(…)
2132.0ms   48.3%                   ScriptMessageHandlerDelegate::didPostMessage(…)
1274.0ms   28.9%                    -[JSContext initWithVirtualMachine:]
 769.0ms   17.4%                    -[JSContext init]
 30.0ms     0.6%                 -[BenchmarkViewController userContentController:didReceiveScriptMessage:]
 16.0ms     0.3%                 -[JSValue toObject]

It looks like nearly half the time is spent in JSContext² initializers. As previously mentioned, the WKWebView API is open source, so it's actually possible to read the source and see what's going on. If we look at the ScriptMessageHandlerDelegate::didPostMessage source we can see that indeed for every postMessage() call on the JS side a new JSContext is initialized to own the deserialized value.

Even when not doing any postMessage calls on the JS side, and just measuring WKWebView's evaluateJavaScript:completionHandler: latency, there was still lots of time spent in JSContext initialization. This turned out to be because the completion handler also results in a JSContext being created in order to own the deserialized value. Thankfully this only happens if a completion handler is specified and there is a result, in other cases the function exits early.

After thinking about this some more, it occurred to me that the old location.hash mechanism could still work with a WKWebView. By adding a WKNavigationDelegate to the web view, it's possible to observe location changes on the native side. I implemented this approach and was pleasantly surprised to see that it took 0.95ms. This was almost 4x faster than the officially sanctioned mechanism (albeit still about twice as slow as the equivalent on a UIWebView, but that is presumably explained by the IPC overhead).

I then wondered if using location.hash to communicate in both directions (changing the location on the native side, listening for hashchange events on the JS side) would be be even better (to bypass more of the JS execution machinery), but that approach ended up being slower (for both UIWebView and WKWebView) since it involved more delegate invocations.

Putting all this together, here are the results (in milliseconds, averaged over 100 round trips) using these mechanisms on various devices (all running iOS 8.1) using my test bed.

Method/Device iPhone 5 (A6) iPad mini 2 (A7) iPhone 6 (A8) Simulator (Core i7)
UIWebView
location.hash 0.63 0.44 0.37 0.15
WKWebView
WKScriptMessageHandler 6.97 3.63 3.03 2.75
location.hash 1.3 0.95 0.77 0.32

I reported this performance problem to Apple last summer (while iOS 8 was still in beta), but I haven't seen activity in this area. Ideally there would be a way to skip over JS value deserialization altogether, for cases where the client doesn't actually benefit from the built-in parsing that is done. Specifically, Quip uses Protocol Buffer-encoded messages to have richer (and typed) data passed back and forth between the native and JS side, and so, as far as the JS runtime is concerned, they're all strings anyway.

Separately, it is a good question as to why I'm making such a big fuss over the overhead of one millisecond (or three) per call. Quip continues to be a “hybrid” app, with the editing experience implemented in a web view (a UIWebView for now). With the launch of spreadsheets we now have even more native ↔ web communication, and in some cases we notify the web view of touch events continuously while UIScrollViews are scrolled (for custom behavior³). When trying to hit 60 frames per second, spending 3 milliseconds of your 16 millisecond budget on pure overhead feels wasteful.

Update on 06/29/2015: Mark Lam recently fixed ScriptMessageHandlerDelegate::didPostMessage to reuse JSContext instances across calls, which fixes one of the two performance problems that this post covers. I've filed another bug to track the remaining issue with evaluateJavaScript:completionHandler:.

Update on 08/12/2015: The other bug has been fixed too, and both fixes are live in iOS 9. I have also discovered additional alternative mechanisms that perform better. See my more recent post about the current state of things.

  1. Astute observers will remark that my blog post used to recommend either changing location.hash or using the click() method on an anchor node. I have since discovered that click() results in a forced layout recalculation (via hit testing) as part of dispatching the event. I have since updated the post to recommend location.hash.
  2. I find it a bit odd that JavaScriptCore is not part of Apple's web-accessible documentation set. Even their own release notes announcing the framework say “for information about the classes of this framework, see the header files.”
  3. This involved yet more spelunking into UIWebView internals, something I will hopefully be posting about soon.