How Opening The Source Helps You

When I opened the source to my Mandelbrot fun project, I did this because I hoped people would look into what TraceMonkey could optimize better there, and because I hoped an open example application helps others base their apps on XULRunner.

Now the second part is a long-term goal that I don't expect will be something that happens soon, but the first point has already been followed: As Boris points out in his comment, he filed two bugs on TraceMonkey, being able to use my code or variations of it as testcases, and there are good chances TraceMonkey will be improved to speed up those cases as well.

Additionally though, Boris pointed out possible ways to improve my code in an earlier post after reading it, and a guy calling himself "prefiks" implemented those ways and a bit more in a patch linked in another comment. When I applied that patch, the numeric algorithm approach with TraceMonkey enabled was sped up by a factor 5 and now I get the base image painted in 1.2 seconds on my machine - and even see updates of the image during drawing, which is what I wanted all along! I also tested it with the XULRunner of Fennec M7 on my N810, and even though it takes a bit over 90 seconds to paint this image, one can watch it build up and so it even feels usable there!

So, opening the source should help TraceMonkey being improved and even helped me making my fun side project more usable. This is the power of keeping the source open, and I hope an encouragement for other people to do the same.