Yay I got a GSOC slot :)
So I hope I don’t have to introduce myself anymore to you guys. Instead I’ll show you what I’ve planned to do over the summer:
Motivation for Proposal / Goal:
Back in KDE 3 times, Quanta+ was one of the reasons for me to use KDE. In my eyes it was the IDE for web development out there, and I loved to use it. Sadly it’s bitrotting nowadays without a finished KDE 4 port. That, combined with the fact that more and more distributions drop all KDE 3 packages, makes the need for a port more urgent than ever.
Implementation Details:
Thankfully, KDevelop 4 is nearing it’s first release and the KDevplatform is mature enough nowadays. This means that during summer I shall finish the port of Quanta+ to KDevplatform and supply it with all the plugins required for a proper webdevelopment IDE. My goal is it to provide a proper IDE for PHP webdevelopment. In more detail:
- make Quanta+ 4 compile
- remove obsolete plugins or code parts in Quanta+
- port required plugins to KDevplatform structure
- polish PHP plugin, including XDebug support
- polish Script Execute plugin
- polish CSS plugin
- get a first working version of a XHTML/XML plugin, if time allows even with HTML (SGML) support
- support autocompletion
- support inline validation
- support documents that use multiple languages (XML, PHP, CSS, JavaScript) at the same time
- polish the UI/Workflow for Webdevelopment
- hide KDevelop/C++ specific actions
- add templates for common PHP frameworks
- if time allows, get a rough support for JavaScript (at least Outline for functions)
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Ok, you should know by now that I love profiling and making things faster. Yet there’s always a “but”. For me it’s blocking syscalls, or anything that makes the app “slow” for the user but doesn’t show up in Callgrind as the Instruction Fetch cost doesn’t go up.
The usual suspect is of course locks (which we have quite a lot in KDevelop) or QProcesses with waitForFinished() or similar… You won’t see them in any Callgrind profile. Does anyone know a way to achieve that? Something that makes Callgrind increase the Ir cost for blocking func calls depending on the time it blocks? Or some other tool that would show me these?
And if you are interested: I was still able to find the cause for slow parsing of Custom Make Manager projects (Qt, Linux Kernel, …) in KDevelop: The cache in the IncludePathResolver never hit, since a operator== was improperly implemented ;-) I really wonder how we could have missed that for so long! I’ve also added some more changes that should make it much faster to parse projects that rely on the IncludePathResolver. I was personally now able to parse 10.000 files of the Linux Kernel in about 9.5 minutes. This is roughly a third of the Kernel, so I’d get to a total of approx 30min. Compare that to the 2.5h for 5% that one of our users reported ;-)
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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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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 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. 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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Ha, what a bit of a bribe can do to me… Someday earlier today a user of the PHP plugin for KDevelop brought up the flickering issue in it again. Well as I told him: I myself find it very annoying and wanted to fix it since quite some time, but never got around to it… Usually that would be it and I’d go watch some more FamilyGuy until I’m in the mood to track this bugger down. But well, thankfully Phlogi wasn’t so easy to dispatch:
milian: ok… I’ll send you pizza and beer if you fix this!
Hours of gdb sessions later, I finally committed a fix. So Phlogi, if you read this: You owe me ;-)
To all others: If you tried the PHP plugin out and the flickering was too much for you: Give it a try again! I’m personally totally overwhelmed, the difference is huge! I often perceived the PHP plugin to be magnitudes slower than the C++ one. Well, looks like most of this was only due to the flickering. Now things are much smoother.
Happy holidays!
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Hey all!
Just a quick note: Niko and me moved PHP & PHP-Docs to kdereview, we hope to move both plugins to extragear/sdk/kdevelop-plugins. So, if I understood things correctly, after a two week period the plugins will get moved there (well, if we pass the review, but I think we can do that).
So for anybody that uses the plugins from SVN, you’ll have to relocate. The new addresses are:
/trunk/kdereview/kdevelop-php/trunk/kdereview/kdevelop-php-docs
See you in two weeks :)
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So, it’s been roughly a year since my first commit to kdelibs. According to Ohloh it’s been in November 2008. And boy have I learned much in this year. I learned C++ just to be able to contribute to KDE, since I thought it would be awesome to be able to “fix your own itch”. I have to say: It was the best decision I ever made.
I really came to appreciate FOSS in a whole new light: Contributing to a big project like KDE gets you in contact with lots of nice people. And they will help you get things done. What’s better is that in the process you learn lots of things. And I mean lots. I can now use GDB, Valgrind, now my way around some parts of the KDE/Qt API, can investigate performance related questions… And since these are such huge topics, there’s always more to learn, much more!
I doubt someone could learn that much by reading books or writing his own little application without the help of a community. The wealth of possibilities inside KDE will increase your horizon constantly. And there is tons of very good code to study! Want to know why something is not working? Look at the source. Still not helping? Ask your fellow developers. I really have to say it’s an awesome feeling to be part of this big community.
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