MW

FOSDEM 2010 - Day 1

Hey everyone!

Just a quick blurb about my first day at FOSDEM so far:

The City of Brussels

All I have to say about the things I saw this morning is simply: Wow. What a city. I really like it’s … /”style”/?! Magnificent old buildings, no dull corners, everything is a bit organic, grown together. I really like it. When I drove with the bus to the University today I really got thinking: What could Berlin have looked like if not these sons of b*****s messed up our history… Oh well - off to better thoughts…

The KDevelop talk by Aleix

Yeah, I think Aleix really nailed this one! Imo it was really well done and the audience also received it well. I really liked how he first talked about some parts that are so good in KDevelop (“we know everything” ;-)) and then - BOOM - he showed it off :) There were some interesting questions from the audience as well, probably most notably something along the lines of:

Eclipse has 300+ developers working on it - how do you manage to create something faster and better (for C++)

He, I think the work of the past years starts to pay of finally! Kudos to all the other developers who worked on it.

Another one asked me, whether there are any payed developers, or any kind of financial support at all. Well the answer is sadly: No, none at all… But imagine what we could do with KDevelop, if some of the core developers could get paid for working on it! Ah, wishful dreaming so far…

FOSDEM generally

It’s cool I think, pretty crowded with actually interested people. I mean sure, there is the odd guy requesting instant bug fixing (come on people: if you have a hand written list of bugs you want to see fixed, why wait for something like FOSDEM to get told that you have to report it to bugs.kde.org anyways?…). But there are also people you just stop by and tell you: Amarok is awesome! I really like KDE! KDevelop is amazing!

PS: What really amazes me as well is how many people are buying T-Shirts! I alone, while looking after the booth, sold like 10+ of the Amarok shirts. And - imo - only real fans do that, no? Really appreciate the users who show their support that way.

PPS: Lets just hope that our accommodation works out: Seems like people are already leaving tomorrow, not on Monday like I thought. And the hotel thought we would arrive yesterday… Yeah - I missed the beer event :’( Something I definitely have to improve next year!

Comments

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Comment by apol (not verified) (2010-02-08 00:28:00)

:)

I’m really really happy you liked the talk!

I think it’s been really good for KDevelop that we’ve been there :)

Enjoy!

Comment by sreich (not verified) (2010-02-07 19:06:00)

The hard work that has gone into KDevelop is evident…it’s amazing :)

As a kde hacker, I absolutely must thank you guys for creating this amazing IDE. It really increases my productivity 10 fold, at least ;-)

The features the application has are very forward-looking, and very promising. Soon you can be gobbling up every other developing program ;-p

And it is becoming quite stable, so I actually use it all day, every day, in place of Qt-Creator and Kate (in that order of greatness).

Anyways, keep up the good work (everyone)!

Comment by Paul Fee (not verified) (2010-02-07 12:27:00)

Hi,

At the KDevelop4 talk someone asked about using something like GraphViz to visualize display of variables, rather than the expandable tree of variables common in most IDEs/debuggers.

I like the way DDD can show structures visually, e.g. circular linked lists look circular.

There was also a good talk on potential features for Anjuta.

http://fosdem.org/2010/schedule/events/gnome_devtools

These would be nice in KDevelop.

Comment by Milian Wolff (2010-02-07 14:08:00)

You mean inside the ControlFlowGraph classes that represent e.g. a cyclic structure should be a circle instead of a square? Well imo this is rather a specialcase. Instead it should e.g. visualize a pointer to a class of itself with a cyclic arrow arc. Or anything like that. But well - first we need to get the controlflowgraph plugin up to shape!

Comment by Paul Fee (not verified) (2010-02-07 16:10:00)

Is the ControlFlowGraph a representation of the flow of execution of a program? I expect those would be generated by static analysis.

What I mean is representing data structures generated at runtime when debugging, like this example: http://www.gnu.org/software/ddd/all.png

In Nick Papoylias’s talk, he demonstrated how graphs of runtime data structures being built up as the code executed.

http://www.softnet.tuc.gr/~whoneedselta/misha/

It’s the display of runtime information that’s interesting to me. The area of static analysis seems fairly well covered already.

http://liveblue.wordpress.com/2009/06/17/visualize-your-code-in-kdevelop/

Incidentally, you say that SoC work isn’t quite up to shape yet. Is it in playground? Will distro’s package it with KDevelop4 or will I have to get it myself?

Thanks, Paul

Comment by Milian Wolff (2010-02-08 14:36:00)

As we talked during FOSDEM, I have to concur that it would be nice to have this kind of visualization for runtime data.

To regard your last note: The plugin is in playground and requires some experimental kgraphviewer utilities afaik. So it will probably not be packaged by distros - get it yourself. But be aware: There might be some random crashes as well…

Comment by Irina (not verified) (2010-02-07 00:13:00)

Were you the tallish guy with the cap who asked me to watch his laptop, or the darkish guy with the beard and the black T-shirt? Either way, I hope your accommodation worked out too; I was eating with Claudia when she tried to fix it.

Comment by Milian Wolff (2010-02-07 12:11:00)

the tallish one with the cap was me :)

Yeah it worked out hehe :)

Published on February 07, 2010.