Proposal: Remove "WTF" namespace

[TAMURA, Kent]

Hi WTF owners and platform-architeture-dev@,

I am proposing the removal of the "WTF" namespace and its merger into the "blink" namespace.

Here are the reasons for this proposal:

• There is no significant advantage to distinguishing between the blink and WTF namespaces.
  Historically, the WTF namespace was created in WebKit to house common code between the JSC and WebCore namespaces.  That is not the case in Chromium.
• According to the Google C++ style guide, namespace names should be lowercase, so "WTF" would need to be changed regardless.
• Many WTF symbols are brought into the global namespace by using WTF::Foo in header files, which pollutes the global namespace. While this practice should stop, adding the WTF:: prefix to all call sites in Blink would be a significant effort. By merging WTF into the blink namespace, we can mitigate the impact on existing code.

Are there any comments on this proposal?

A relevant thread: https://groups.google.com/a/chromium.org/g/platform-architecture-dev/c/DU2xiGoTHOE/m/4AV1wmoYCwAJ

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TAMURA Kent
Software Engineer, Google

[Kentaro Hara]

LGTM.

(I have a question about the importance of the work but that's a separate question to be resolved in your team. Technically, no objection :-)

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Kentaro Hara, Tokyo

[Michael Lippautz]

lgtm

Are you intending to keep the folder name there? One could argue that this could be e.g.platform/base. (Not suggesting that this needs to be done now though.)

[Nico Weber]

lgtm

[TAMURA, Kent]

Thanks for the feedback.

Since there are no objections, I'll assume we have an agreement to remove the WTF namespace. The tracking bug for this task is crbug.com/422768753.

On Wed, Jun 4, 2025 at 9:24 PM Nico Weber <tha...@chromium.org> wrote:

lgtm

On Wed, Jun 4, 2025, 2:45 AM Michael Lippautz <mlip...@chromium.org> wrote:

lgtm

Are you intending to keep the folder name there? One could argue that this could be e.g.platform/base. (Not suggesting that this needs to be done now though.)

For now, I am not planning to change the platform/wtf/ directory name. This task will only affect the namespace within the code.

 

On Wed, Jun 4, 2025 at 3:10 AM Kentaro Hara <har...@chromium.org> wrote:

LGTM.

(I have a question about the importance of the work but that's a separate question to be resolved in your team. Technically, no objection :-)

I don't believe we need to formally assign anyone to this task, as the workload isn't large and it can be done incrementally. It should be manageable to work on this during downtime, such as while waiting for code reviews on main projects, or as a 20% time project.

 

On Wed, Jun 4, 2025 at 10:05 AM TAMURA, Kent <tk...@chromium.org> wrote:

Hi WTF owners and platform-architeture-dev@,

I am proposing the removal of the "WTF" namespace and its merger into the "blink" namespace.

Here are the reasons for this proposal:

• There is no significant advantage to distinguishing between the blink and WTF namespaces.
  Historically, the WTF namespace was created in WebKit to house common code between the JSC and WebCore namespaces.  That is not the case in Chromium.
• According to the Google C++ style guide, namespace names should be lowercase, so "WTF" would need to be changed regardless.
• Many WTF symbols are brought into the global namespace by using WTF::Foo in header files, which pollutes the global namespace. While this practice should stop, adding the WTF:: prefix to all call sites in Blink would be a significant effort. By merging WTF into the blink namespace, we can mitigate the impact on existing code.

Are there any comments on this proposal?

A relevant thread: https://groups.google.com/a/chromium.org/g/platform-architecture-dev/c/DU2xiGoTHOE/m/4AV1wmoYCwAJ

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TAMURA Kent
Software Engineer, Google

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Kentaro Hara, Tokyo

[Daniel Cheng]

Btw, is anyone updating the Blink GC plugin? It has some hardcoded references to WTF:: types; we'll need to update those right?

https://source.chromium.org/search?q=f:%5Etools%2Fclang%2Fblink_gc_plugin%20%22WTF::%22&ss=chromium

Daniel

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[Michael Lippautz]

On Sat, Jul 26, 2025 at 7:04 AM Daniel Cheng <dch...@chromium.org> wrote:

Btw, is anyone updating the Blink GC plugin? It has some hardcoded references to WTF:: types; we'll need to update those right?

https://source.chromium.org/search?q=f:%5Etools%2Fclang%2Fblink_gc_plugin%20%22WTF::%22&ss=chromium

For GC-related stuff, yes, @Omer Katz 

[Omer Katz (chromium.org)]

Kent is already handling that in crrev.com/c/6786468.