Python GDB Rocks!

I wanted a non-painful way to figure out what’s causing bonus file IO. I’ve noticed that gtk likes to open files, but I didn’t have the exact details. So I grabbed python gdb, and with some tips on syscalls from gdb old-timers managed to produce a report to assign blame for open()ing files to relevant Mozilla functions.

Other than the gdb-hating syscalls issue, achieving this was simple

Are you are a developer who has been frustrated by the pathetic state of the art in code search engines and code browsing experience on the web? Have you been longing for being able to view code with more aid than coloured words?

David Humphrey just released his DXR bombshell. The “basic” concept behind DXR is extraction of the rich semantic information gathered by tools like GCC, Spidermonkey and xpidl. This data is then coherently linked together into a pretty UI in order to provide cleverness during code browsing sessions.

DXR will be happy to answer seemingly trivial queries:

Working on Fennec performance N810 has been very educational. I have been learning more and more about performance profiling on crappy platforms. I define a platform as crap if it has poor development tools, limited OS or other significant limitations. Linux is a crappy platform in this case because it’s running on ARM where oprofile barely does anything and there are no other performance tools for N810 (more modern ARM cpus should user-space perf counters and be more useful for instrumentation).

JSD Secret Sauce for JS Optimization