Posted on March 30, 2010 at 04:59 UTC,
filed under the category
MacGDBp.
Tags:
MacGDBp,
In between working on Bugdar 2, Phalanx, and Chromium, I’ve also been working on MacGDBp 1.4.
With the 1.3.0 release, I tried to address a couple of issues with the underlying network communication layer (called SocketWrapper, which was an Obj-C bridge to a BSD socket). The primary issue I tried to address was with Unicode characters; MacGDBp really only knows how to deal with ASCII text, which has proven problematic for international users. I tried to address this with the 1.3 branch by switching how data was stored and processed. But the 1.3.0 release was an utter failure from this perspective. It crashed extremely often, which lead to the 1.3.1 release that reverted the new network-layer changes. (That said, the new features introduced by 1.3 have been well-received.)
But the issues with the network layer ran far deeper than just dealing with Unicode text. MacGDBp uses synchronous communication with the debugger engine. When you issue a command (step in/out/over, get source, get properties, etc.), the command would be sent and then the thread would block until it received a response. This is bad, especially because MacGDBp does not use background threads; all the communication happens on the main UI thread. This can lead to beach balling and a bad user experience. So, why did I do this? Because synchronous communication makes for a dead-simple API. Asynchronous communication requires a lot more bookkeeping and works through callbacks.
So, for 1.4.0, I decided it was time to revisit the debugger backend. Rather than just trying to adjust how data is transmitted (ASCII vs. Unicode), I decided to rewrite from scratch the entire Xdebug communication layer. Rather than using raw BSD sockets, the 1.4 branch uses the CFNetwork API. This yields two huge benefits. The first is that all network activity is asynchronous because socket stream events are scheduled on the run loop. When data is available, a callback is executed and the UI is updated (as opposed to blocking the thread while waiting for a response). This also makes the application more robust, because if the response never comes, it will not lock up the entire UI. Secondly, by using a Foundation-level framework, UTF8 support comes pre-baked via the toll-free bridge to NSString.
I’ve been rewriting the back end in my spare time and it’s finally starting to stabilize. This release is still fairly far out, though. This core network change is also leading to a large refactoring of the entire application to make it more easily unit testable in the future. One of the results of this is creating a new LoggingController to record all network activity. The goal with this “hidden feature” is to make it easier to track down causes of bug reports. The log looks like this; it’s not pretty, but it should get the job done:
I haven’t yet selected the set of feature enhancements that are scheduled for this milestone. Before any new feature work can be started, the 1.4 trunk needs to become as stable as the 1.3 branch. If you have any feature requests, please search for or file new issues and vote them up in the bug tracker.
Tracking Info:
Current SHA1: a7725f8
Version: 1.4.0.40 β
Last Release Build: 2010-03-29 17:51:39
I want some!
Looking forward to trying this app again. I was very excited when I found it right up until I realized how it reliably crashed all the time. 🙂
Thanks for all your hard work.
1.3.0 was definitely crashtastic. If you’re experiencing crashes with 1.3.1, please file a bug report because I consider that version to be fairly stable.