Web Apocrypha

In this post I'll show you how to configure and compile a MinGW toolchain for cross-compilation on Linux, then how to build Qt using this toolchain and finally compile the Qt port of WebKit from trunk.

When I tried to cross compile QtWebKit for ARM-Linux, I didn't find any clear description, so I have decided to write a blogpost about it. It's not too hard, but if you have never done something like this, it can be a little bit confusing. In this post, I will describe this method in some simple steps.

There are a lot of make specifications in Qt, but none of them is suitable for RVCT compilation. So, if you want to compile QtWebKit with RVCT, you have two options: either you create a new specification or you can use an existing one with wrapper scripts. In this post I'll describe the second option.

It is time to try out my new freya tool. Only some web-sites and a fresh Qt (4.6.0) and QtWebKit (r51481) are needed. The values are peak memory consumptions, which is not necessary the best choice (since the sum of their total value is greater than the peak memory consumption), but at least we can see the memory hungry parts of QtWebKit.

Every program allocates memory, regardless of its size. Reducing it is an important task and an eternal struggle. Using advanced memory profiling tools, it is easy to see that the most memory is consumed by ... hash tables, vectors, unicode strings, mmaped memory regions, etc. But is THIS what you are interested in? Isn't it would be better to know how much memory consumed by WebCore, JavaScriptCore, Qt, or by a particular component, like WebCore/css?

When I tried to build QtWebKit on Windows the first time, I realized it was a more complex task than on Linux. I experimented a lot to make building, testing and WebKit scripts work correctly. I decided that I would fix imperfect scripts and write a blogpost about this topic to relieve WebKit developers sufferings.