Month: November 2017

We are a couple of months into Builder’s 3.28 development. We have fewer big ticket features scheduled this cycle when compared to 3.26. However that is replaced by a multitude of smaller features and details. Let’s take a look at some of what has been done already.

Flatpak Improvements

Early in the cycle we merged a feature upstream in flatpak-builder to emit escape sequences to set the terminal title as we progress through the build pipeline. Users of jhbuild are probably familiar with this type of thing as it does something similar. We can now consume this information from Builder to show more detailed progress about your Flatpak as it builds.

With yesterdays Flatpak 0.10.1 release, we got a feature we needed to access /usr/include of the host from a Flatpak. This means Builder can more easily develop against your host platform when using Builder from flatpak. It’s not a common request, but one we can support now.

Also yesterday, was the release of flatpak-builder 0.10.5. It has a new feature allowing us to specify --state-dir. If we detect a new enough flatpak-builder, we’ll use this to share dependency checkouts among various projects. When combined with shallow clones, I expect this to help reduce downloads for people who contribute to multiple projects.

Pseudo-Terminal Integration

We now depend on libvte directly from libide. This allows us to use a pseudo-terminal (PTY) in the build pipeline and show a terminal for the build output. This is both faster than our previous GtkTextView implementation and also adds support for colors and fixed scroll-back. If you have something other than a subprocess generating a build logs, we merge those into the terminal too!

Simplified Newcomers

As seen previously, we have a simpler process for newcomers wanting to explore an existing GNOME project. Just click on the icon and hit run!

Improved To-Do

By increasing our guarantees of thread-safety, we were able to speed up our scanning for todo items. We also fixed a few bugs along the way.

Improved Editor Search

Our editor search is some of the trickiest code in Builder. This is because we have to try to emulate various systems such as Vim. We refactored quite a bit of it to make it more resilient and handle all those tricky corner cases better.

More Code Indexers

Patrick contributed a GJS code indexer which can make it easier to jump around to classes and functions in your GJS-based project. I did the same for Vala. If you’re part of either of these language communities, we could really use your help improving our support for them.

Three-Finger-Swipe

As seen previously, the editor gained three-finger-swipe support to move editor panels left or right. You need Wayland for this feature for proper three-finger-swipe support for the lower layers of the stack.

Improved Meson and CMake Integration

Both the Meson and CMake build system plugins have been ported to C to get some type safety on our side. The architecture was also changed a bit to make it easier to extract compiler flags without needlessly advancing the build pipeline.

Unit Testing

The basics of unit testing have landed. We still have lots to do here before 3.28 like running under gdb and getting failure logs.

Find-Other-File Improvements

The find-other-file plugin was improved to support using the global search to list alternate files. This can be handy when switching between source, headers, and ui files.

Compile Commands Database

Builder now has a helper for compile_commands.json style files made popular by Clang. This can simplify the implementation of CFLAGS extraction by build systems that support it.

Build Target Providers

Creating and IDE that natively supports such a wide variety of project types and packaging technologies can be quite a challenge. There is often no clear abstraction for where a piece of information should be extracted. For example, does the build system know about installed build targets and how to run them? Is it the packaging technology, or a .desktop file? How about when containers are used?

This harsh reality means that sometimes we need to be very specific about our extension points. The new build target provider allows various system components to give us information about build artifacts. This has made it easier to run applications even when the build system has limited support. Long story short, if you use flatpak, things should mostly Just Work™, even when you use less well supported build systems like CMake.

Happy hacking!

Anoop, one of Builder’s GSoC students this past summer, put together a code-index engine built upon Builder’s fuzzy search algorithm. It shipped with support for C and C++. Shortly after the 3.27 cycle started, Patrick added support for GJS. Today I added support for Vala which was rather easy given the other code we have in Builder.

It looks something like this:

Happy Hacking!

Every release of both GNOME and Builder, we try to lower the barrier a bit more for new contributions. Bastian mentioned to me at GUADEC that we could make things even simpler from the Builder side of things. After a few mockups, I finally found some time to start implementing it.

With the upcoming Nightly build of Builder, you’ll be able to warp right through cloning and building of an application that is ready for newcomer contributions. Just open Builder and click on the application’s icon.

There is still more to do here, like adding a language emblem and such. Of course, if you want to work on that, do get in touch.

Way back in 2011 people were discussing usage of modern GCC features like __attribute__((cleanup())). A few years later it found it’s way into our API’s in GLib with one small caveat, only GCC/Clang support (so no MSVC/Xlc/SunProC). Since I couldn’t care less about MSVC I’ve been using it for years (and really Microsoft, you could contribute more to the mental health of open source programmers by modernizing MSVC).

I want to give a few examples of patterns I use to make tracking down issues easier.

Using GTask

static void
my_async_cb (GObject      *object,
             GAsyncResult *result,
             gpointer      user_data)
{
  // take ownership of task from caller
  g_autoptr(GTask) task = user_data;
  g_autoptr(GError) error = NULL;

  g_assert (G_IS_TASK (task));
  g_assert (G_IS_ASYNC_RESULT (result));

  if (!do_something_finish (result, &error))
    // explicitly pass ownership of error to GTask
    g_task_return_error (task, g_steal_pointer (&error));
  else
    g_task_return_boolean (task, TRUE);
}

void
my_obj_frob_async (MyObj               *self,
                   GCancellable        *cancellable,
                   GAsyncReadyCallback  callback,
                   gpointer             user_data)
{
  g_autoptr(GTask) task = NULL;

  g_return_if_fail (MY_IS_OBJ (self));
  g_return_if_fail (!cancellable || G_IS_CANCELLABLE (cancellable));

  task = g_task_new (self, cancellable, callback, user_data);
  g_task_set_source_tag (task, my_obj_frob_async);

  // pass task ownership to callback
  do_something_async (cancellable,
                      my_async_cb,
                      g_steal_pointer (&task));
}

The nice thing about this style is that all ownership transfers are explicit. I hope that in the future we can get some automatic checking of this via coverity or gcc/clang plugins. But we’re not quite there yet. Either way, it simplifies the auditing case.

Using Idle Callbacks

State tracking during idle callbacks can very easily turn into security issues. So make sure your function always has access to a reference, and simplify your releasing of the data by allowing the GSource to own the closure. For example, with a GObject it is pretty simple.

static gboolean
frob_from_idle_cb (gpointer data)
{
  MyObj *self = data;

  my_obj_frob (self);

  return G_SOURCE_REMOVE;
}

gdk_threads_add_idle_full (G_PRIORITY_LOW,
                           frob_from_idle_cb,
                           g_object_ref (obj),
                           g_object_unref);

The GSource which is registered and calls frob_from_idle_cb() will automatically call g_object_unref() after the function returns G_SOURCE_REMOVE. This also ensures your object isn’t finalized before the callback has occurred.

This also works with g_timeout_add_full(), gdk_threads_add_timeout_full().

Creating Custom Closures

Sometimes you might have state that is more complex than passing around a single GObject. In that case, create a closure structure and define a cleanup function so you can use g_autoptr().

typedef struct
{
  MyObj *self;
  guint  count;
} FrobState;

static void
frob_state_free (FrobState *state)
{
  g_clear_object (&state->self);
  g_free (state);
}

G_DEFINE_AUTOPTR_CLEANUP_FUNC (FrobState, frob_state_free)

With the above definition, you can use g_autoptr(FrobState) state = user_data; like you would for objects. This also works with the idle functions, just use (GDestroyNotify)frob_state_free as your cleanup function.