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Building Mozilla Firefox

Trying to build Mozilla Firefox was such an experience. I have mixed feelings about if it's a good or bad one but nonetheless, I will share my experience.

I built mine on my macbook pro running version 10.12. The things I had and/or installed were the following:
-Terminal
-Xcode
-Homebrew
-Python
-Rust
-Mozilla Firefox Code

Downloading the Mozilla Firefox code was the simplest part, it took long but it was simple. The real challenge was trying to compile the code. The amount of time it takes to successfully build it is over an hour. Imagine reaching the end of the compilation, seeing that there is an error, and the compiler stopping. This was the case for six days! It took a long time to get this working.

At first I thought there was permission issues so I tried building with sudo. This was not the right thing to do as it messed up my future attempts to recompile the code. I was told to remove the object directory and start again without sudo.

The next thing that was suggested to me was to install or reinstall Rust. I thought I installed it already but it turned out that i didn't. I installed it and tried recompiling again. Like all the other times, it would go on and on and on with complete failure.

It turned out that I didn't actually have rust installed so I went ahead and installed it. I tried running again and I still got nothing. The errors I was getting were:

error: 'stdlib.h' file not found

/usr/local/Cellar/llvm/5.0.0/include/c++/v1/wchar.h:119:15: fatal error: 'wchar.h' file not found, err: true

/usr/local/Cellar/llvm/5.0.0/include/c++/v1/stdlib.h:94:15: fatal error: 'stdlib.h' file not found, err: true

/usr/local/Cellar/llvm/5.0.0/include/c++/v1/stdlib.h:94:15: fatal error: 'stdlib.h' file not found, err: true

After giving up and turning to my teacher for help, a student who literally just solved the same issue before my eyes was just standing there. The teacher asked him to help me and he said run this simple line in terminal. 

Xcode-select --install

I said to him, I already have terminal, he said, "So did I, but this worked for me." After running it, it prompted a gui dialog asking me to accept and install some things. After that, I deleted my object folder for one last time and I recompiled. Sure enough, after an hour, it compiled.

The odd thing is that even though it successfully compiled, the amount of warnings that were flying by in the terminal was significant. There are so many warnings. It's unusual to see something work with hundreds of warnings, but it works so I'm not complaining.

Overall, it was a good experience and I couldn't have done without my classmates and teachers help. They were a crucial part in my success. Working on an open source project with a community is the best way to work. Individual progress can be achieved, but community is greater by a long shot.

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