I just need to get this out quickly:
We were aware that KDevelop’s CMake support was slow. Too slow actually. It was profiled months ago and after a quick look that turned up QRegExp, it was discarded in fear of having to rewrite the whole parser properly, without using QRegExp. Which btw. is still a good idea of course.
But well, today I felt like I should do some more tinkering. I mean I managed to optimize KDevelop’s Cpp support recently (parsing Boost’s huge generated template headers, like e.g. vector200.hpp is now 30% faster). I managed to make KGraphViewer usable for huge callgraphs I produce in Massif Visualizer. So how hard could it be to make KDevelop’s CMake at least /a bit/ faster, he?
Yeah well an hour later and two commits later, I managed to find and fix two bottlenecks. Both where related to QRegExp. Neither was the actual parser, instead it was the part that evaluated CMake files, esp. the STRING(...) function. So even if we’d used a proper parser generator, this would still been slow.
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memory consumption overview
Hello everyone!
In my opinion, the massif visualizer is ready for testing. I bet there are still a few rough edges, but the most important features are in. So if you are going to do any memory profiling these days, please take a look at my tool and give me feedback. I’d be especially interested in whether the massif visualizer helps in the work flow to analyze massif data files.
My personal work flow so far is the following:
callgraph of detailed massif snapshot
- generate massif log, one way or the other (unit tests preferred since they give you reproducible test cases)
- open log in massif-visualizer, look at overall consumption chart 1. how does the memory consumption evolve? is there a memleak? 2. are there designated peaks which could be reduced? 3. are there any (significant) contributions to the memory consumption, that needlessly stay over the whole application life?
- to find the actual culprits in code and/or to grasp the composition of a memory peak, use the detailed snapshot analysis
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Hey everyone!
I just committed an (imo) insanely useful feature for KCacheGrind: Transparent loading of compressed Callgrind files. Finally one does not have to keep those Callgrind files around uncompressed, hogging up lots of space. And what is even more important: It’s much easier to share these files now, as you can send or upload them as .gz or better yet .bz2 and open them directly. KDE architecture just rocks :) So in KDE 4.5 the best profiling visualizer just got better :D
In related news: I’m spending my time as intern at KDAB currently by creating an application to visualize Massif. If you are interested, check the sources out on gitorious: http://gitorious.org/massif-visualizer
It’s still pretty limited in what it offers, yet is probably already more useful than the plain ASCII graph that ms_print generates:
Visualization of a Massif output file
This is very WIP but the visuals are somewhat working now. I plan to make the whole graph react on user input, i.e. zoomable, click to show details about snapshots, show information about the heap items that make up the stacked part of the diagram, …
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Woha, quite a few days flew by without me blogging about anything. Thankfully the others started to write so I don’t have to repeat it all ;-) Instead I’ll concentrate on stuff I did or learned.
GHNS for Snippets
Well, first I think an excuse is in oder: There is a GHNS button for Kate Snippets in 4.4.0 but it’s broken, neither me nor Joseph had time to acutally use and fix it… But anyways, I fixed it now for 4.4.1. For 4.5 we’ll also have an Upload Dialog.
I also added both now to KDevelop, you can now upload and download snippets from it. I added a few dump examples but will probably improve it steadily.
On Saturday and Sunday I started to profile Kate highlighting for a large MySQL dump and managed to greatly improve the speed. Actually the funny thing is that I could improve RegExp based highlighting (you still should try to prevent using it, it will always be slower than simple char/string based highlighting). And the knowledge for this optimization I had from my time as an active contributor for GeSHi. I feel like it was ages ago, he funny :)
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So, first day of the Kate/KDevelop hacksprint.
We just talked and hacked at the rented flat,got to know each other and had a fun time. Everybody made it more or less in time, even last minute attendee Adymo from Ukraine, nice! Hacking-wise the productivity wasn’t that high, esp. for me, but a few patches got committed here and there.
Right now I’m working on a little speedup for Kate, esp. for big MySQL files - lets see how it turns out. Cullmann showed me a few things I could do so maybe it works out, lets see.
Over the next week I plan to push in user configurable include paths for the PHP plugin and do some more Snippets & Scripting work in Kate, lets see how it turns out. I’ll go home now, kinda sucks that I don’t stay with the others here at the flat but have to take a 1h ride into the city… Berlin is definitely too big :D
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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++)
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Hey all!
Just wanted to give you a little rundown on Snippets in Kate 4.4 (via the snippets_tng plugin) and KDevelop Beta 8 (soon to be released).
Note: The Kate plugin was written by Jowenn and introduced me to all these nice features. For KDevelop I wrote a somewhat simpler yet imo better implementation. We will try to get the best of both worlds into KDE 4.5. Stay tuned!
General Usage & Features
- create a snippet repository (or download via GHNS [see below])
- create snippets in that repository
- insert snippets via the snippets view (i.e. double click), or (imo better/faster) insert them via code-completion (remember: CTRL + Space requests code completion at the current cursor position!).
- snippet gets inserted (properly indented) and potential placeholders/variables get expanded. A variable is something like
%{date} or ${email}. Also take a look at the API documentation. - variables that get inserted via “${…}” will be “selectable”, meaning you can jump from one var to the other by hitting TAB / Shift TAB
- the
%{...} vars will only get expanded and inserted, without getting selectable. - multiple occurrences of the same variable will be updated once one of them gets edited, something that is called “mirroring” in other editors.
- once one edits ESC the cursor is placed at the end of the snippet or to the first occurrence of
${cursor} or %{cursor} and the user types something, the snippet-handler quits and you are left with your normal editor until you insert the next snippet - nested snippets (i.e. insert snippet than insert another one) should “just work”.
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Hey everyone, just a quick blurp:
FOSDEM
Yeah, I’ll go to FOSDEM! Will be my first time, I’m really looking forward to it. Esp. considering that it marks the end of my current semester. My current plan for the following days is:
- visit relatives & friends
- go to FOSDEM
- get an immense overload of hacking at the Kate/KDevelop sprint
- start working as an intern at KDAB
Looks like the future will be much fun :)
But back to FOSDEM: If you have any questions about Kate/KDevelop/PHP, visit me at the KDE booth. I’ll also attend Aleix’s talk about KDevelop for sure.
4.4 release party in Berlin
So well, Nighrose poked me on IRC and I added a short note about a small get-together on the 13th in Berlin. I’m reluctant to call it release party since it’ll be at the rented flat for the Kate/KDevelop sprint attendees, hence only a limited number of people can attend. But esp. other KDE/Qt/KDAB hackers in Berlin & vicinity are welcome. If you want to come by, take a look at the wiki notes about the “party” and contact me by mail.
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Phew, I just finished some last-minute backports to the KDE 4.3.5 branch. Lets hope the bug fixes I and pletourn did are as good as they look. Expect a much more stable Kate for 4.3.5 & 4.4! We managed to fix two bugs which are potentially the cause for dozens of bug reports, all seemingly random. Lets see whether our fixes hold up to our hopes!
Other than that: You should look forward to Kate scripting (with JavaScript) in 4.4. It’s dead simple but actually useful. In the utils.js file we ship with Kate there are now the following tools (all operate on the selection or - if none exists - on the whole document):
- sort - simple sorting
- natsort - natural sorting
- uniq - filter duplicates
- trim - remove leading & trailing whitespace
- ltrim - remove leading whitespace
- rtrim - remove trailing whitespace
Do you have more ideas for such simple helper functions?
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Hey everyone. Been some time since I last blogged… I want to take the chance to give you all a bit of overview over the last changes in the PHP plugin for KDevelop:
I spent quite some time profiling various aspects of the PHP plugin, be it parsing and DUChain building over to (just yesterday) code completion. I’m confident to say that I found (and removed) quite a few bottlenecks, making the plugin much more comfortable to use.
I’m really blown away time over time again by valgrind & KCachegrind… What would we do without these tools?
Documentation
An (imo) very strong point for using KDevelop for PHP programming is it’s seamless support for documentation. Be it the “simple” inline documentation in the Declaration Tooltips or the extended integration of the remote PHP.net docs. But these past days I improved our generator for the inline documentation of built-in PHP language constructs considerably:
- add documentation for function/method parameters
- add
@since where appropriate - fix some missing declarations or bugs, esp. some that where part of SPL
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