Tools Release Notes

Tools 2.9

Fixed Bugs and Malfunctions

Fix unhandled trace event send_to_non_existing_process in fprof.

Own Id: OTP-13998

Improvements and New Features

Improved edoc support in emacs erlang-mode.

Own Id: OTP-13945 Aux Id: PR-1157

Added erldoc to emacs mode which opens html documentation in browser from emacs. For example M-x erldoc-browse RET lists:foreach/2.

Own Id: OTP-14018 Aux Id: PR-1197

Tools 2.8.6

Fixed Bugs and Malfunctions

Errors in type specification and Emacs template generation for gen_statem:code_change/4 has been fixed from bugs.erlang.org's Jira cases ERL-172 and ERL-187.

Own Id: OTP-13746 Aux Id: ERL-172, ERL-187

Fix gc_start/gc_end in fprof tags when parsing old trace logs.

Own Id: OTP-13778 Aux Id: PR-1136

make (tools) and ct_make (common_test) would crash if an Erlang source file contained a -warning() directive.

Own Id: OTP-13855

Tools 2.8.4

Fixed Bugs and Malfunctions

Update fprof to use the new 'spawned' trace event to determine when a process has been created.

Own Id: OTP-13499

Improvements and New Features

Optimize adding multiple modules to an Xref server.

Own Id: OTP-13593

Various emacs mode improvements, such as better tags support.

Own Id: OTP-13610

Tools 2.8.3

Fixed Bugs and Malfunctions

cover:compile_beam/1 and cover:compile_beam_directory/1,2 crashed when trying to compile a beam file without a 'file' attribute. This has been corrected and an error is returned instead.

Thanks to Louis-Philippe Gauthier for reporting this bug.

Own Id: OTP-13200

Fix a bit string comprehension bug in Cover.

Own Id: OTP-13277 Aux Id: PR 856

Tools 2.8

Fixed Bugs and Malfunctions

In order to improve performance of the cover tool, new functions are added for cover compilation and analysis on multiple files. This allows for more parallelisation.

Some improvements of the data base access is also done in order to improve the performance when analysing and resetting cover data.

Minor incompatibility: An error reason from analyse_to_file is changed from no_source_code_found to {no_source_code_found,Module}.

*** POTENTIAL INCOMPATIBILITY ***

Own Id: OTP-12330 Aux Id: seq12757

Attempting to do a cover analysis when neither source code nor beam file could be found would hang the cover server. Corrected to return a proper error.

Own Id: OTP-12806

Improvements and New Features

Allow maps for supervisor flags and child specs

Earlier, supervisor flags and child specs were given as tuples. While this is kept for backwards compatibility, it is now also allowed to give these parameters as maps, see sup_flags and child_spec.

Own Id: OTP-11043

Remove Mnemosyne rules support.

Own Id: OTP-12511

Add printout of total number of calls and time in eprof

Own Id: OTP-12681

Tools 2.7.1

Fixed Bugs and Malfunctions

Fixed a typo in erlang-mode comment.

Own Id: OTP-12214

Add a skeleton for -spec in Erlang mode for Emacs

Own Id: OTP-12283

Improvements and New Features

Cover no longer crashes when compiling receive and the like with just an after clause. Thanks to José Valim for providing a fix.

Own Id: OTP-12328

Tools 2.6.14

Fixed Bugs and Malfunctions

Removed the support for the query keyword from emacs mode (Thanks to Paul Oliver)

Own Id: OTP-11568

Emacs mode improvements (Thanks to Steve Vinoski)

Own Id: OTP-11601

Application upgrade (appup) files are corrected for the following applications:

asn1, common_test, compiler, crypto, debugger, dialyzer, edoc, eldap, erl_docgen, et, eunit, gs, hipe, inets, observer, odbc, os_mon, otp_mibs, parsetools, percept, public_key, reltool, runtime_tools, ssh, syntax_tools, test_server, tools, typer, webtool, wx, xmerl

A new test utility for testing appup files is added to test_server. This is now used by most applications in OTP.

(Thanks to Tobias Schlager)

Own Id: OTP-11744

The emacs erlang mode now match erlang keywords more carefully (Thanks to Steve Vinoski)

Own Id: OTP-11786

The emacs erlang-mode now auto loads for more file types (Thanks to Phil Hagelberg)

Own Id: OTP-11788

Improvements and New Features

cover can run on itself. Also, support for reading BEAM files produced by ancient OTP versions before R9C has been removed.

Own Id: OTP-11692

Support maps in cover

Own Id: OTP-11764

Tools 2.6.13

Fixed Bugs and Malfunctions

Erlang-specific compilation error regexp is added in erlang-eunit.el. This defvar was earlier in erlang.el, but was erroneously removed in R15B02, while still used by erlang-eunit.el.

Own Id: OTP-11417 Aux Id: seq12447

Take compiler options from beam in cover:compile_beam. Thanks to Péter Gömöri.

Own Id: OTP-11439

Silence warnings (Thanks to Anthony Ramine)

Own Id: OTP-11517

Improvements and New Features

Add iodata, nonempty_string to built-in type highlighting for emacs. Thanks to Paul Oliver.

Own Id: OTP-11394

Tools 2.6.12

Improvements and New Features

Remove trailing spaces in Emacs templates. Thanks to Roberto Aloi.

Own Id: OTP-11198

Fixed the Emacs erlang-mode to accommodate the coding style where lists written across several lines have each line starting with a comma. Thanks to Magnus Henoch.

Own Id: OTP-11242

Make the Emacs Erlang mode TRAMP-aware when compiling. Thanks to Tomas Abrahamsson.

Own Id: OTP-11270

Tools 2.6.11

Fixed Bugs and Malfunctions

When cover:stop(Node) was called on a non-existing node, a process waiting for cover data from the node would hang forever. This has been corrected.

Own Id: OTP-10979

Improvements and New Features

Make cover smarter about finding source from beam.

In particular, search using the source path in module_info if the current heuristic fails.

Own Id: OTP-10902

Remove Flymake dependency in erlang-pkg.el. Thanks to Magnus Henoch.

Own Id: OTP-10930

Erlang-mode: Add autoload cookies for file extension associations. Thanks to Magnus Henoch.

Own Id: OTP-10999

Postscript files no longer needed for the generation of PDF files have been removed.

Own Id: OTP-11016

Fix a race condition when there're several applications in apps directory. Thanks to Manuel Rubio.

Own Id: OTP-11028

New option for eprof, 'set_on_spawn'. This option was previously always on and is also the default.

Own Id: OTP-11144

Tools 2.6.9

Fixed Bugs and Malfunctions

Add missing modules in app-file

Own Id: OTP-10439

Make erlang-mode more compatible with package.el (Thanks to Gleb Peregud)

Own Id: OTP-10465

Fix various typos (thanks to Tuncer Ayaz)

Own Id: OTP-10611

Add separate face for exported functions (Thanks to Thomas Järvstrand)

Own Id: OTP-10637

The BIF highlighting in the emacs mode has been updated to correspond with the correct BIFs.

Own Id: OTP-10774

Improvements and New Features

Support for Unicode has been implemented.

Own Id: OTP-10302

A new function, cover:flush(Nodes), is added which will fetch data from remote nodes without stopping cover on those nodes. This is used by test_server and common_test when it is safe to assume that the node will be terminated after the test anyway. The purpose is to avoid processes crashing when re-loading the original beam if the processes is still running old code.

Remote nodes will now continue to count code coverage if the connection to the main node is broken. Earlier, a broken connection would cause the cover_server on the remote node to die and thus any still cover compiled modules would cause process crash when trying to insert cover data in ets tables that used to exist on the cover_server. The new functionality also involves synchronization with the main node if the nodes are reconnected.

*** POTENTIAL INCOMPATIBILITY ***

Own Id: OTP-10523 Aux Id: OTP-10427

Where necessary a comment stating encoding has been added to Erlang files. The comment is meant to be removed in Erlang/OTP R17B when UTF-8 becomes the default encoding.

Own Id: OTP-10630

Fix syntax highlighting of $\' in Emacs mode. Thanks to Magnus Henoch.

Own Id: OTP-10766

Tools 2.6.8

Fixed Bugs and Malfunctions

The last tuple fun call has been removed from fprof.

Own Id: OTP-10091 Aux Id: seq12067

Fix indentation of record fields in Emacs (Thanks to Tomas Abrahamsson)

Own Id: OTP-10120

Documentation fixes (Thanks to Ricardo Catalinas Jiménez )

Own Id: OTP-10121

Remove Erlang-specific compilation error regexp in erlang.el

Own Id: OTP-10168

Fix highlighting of atoms ending with a dollar sign

Like this: 'atom$'. In that example, the last single quote should be recognised as ending the atom. This needs a font-lock workaround similar to the one for strings. Thanks to Magnus Henoch

Own Id: OTP-10178

Xref now accepts filenames with character codes greater than 126. (Thanks to Emile Joubert for reporting the issue.)

Own Id: OTP-10192

Add test_indentation target to lib/tools/emacs/Makefile

Automatically indent test.erl.orig, save to test.erl, and compare to test.erl.intended. Thanks to Magnus Henoch.

Own Id: OTP-10226

Tools 2.6.7

Fixed Bugs and Malfunctions

Makefiles in erts, hipe and tools have been corrected to enable parallel make, i.e MAKEFLAGS=-jX where X is the parallelity number. As a result of this dependencies were corrected since that is what is needed for parallel make to work.

Own Id: OTP-9857 Aux Id: OTP-9451

Minor suppressions and fixes of compilation warnings

Own Id: OTP-10016

Tools 2.6.6.6

Fixed Bugs and Malfunctions

Update system profiling principles to reflect eprof performance improvements.

Own Id: OTP-9656

[cover] fix leftover {'DOWN', ..} msg in callers queue

After stopping cover with cover:stop() there could still be a {'DOWN',...} leftover message in the calling process's message queue. This unexpected leftover could be eliminated if erlang:demonitor/2 with option flush would be used in certain points

Own Id: OTP-9694

Add deps as erlang-flymake include directory.

Update erlang-flymake to recognize the "deps" folder as an include directory. This makes erlang-flymake compatible with the rebar dependency management tool's default folder structure, which puts included dependencies in "deps".(Thanks to Kevin Albrecht)

Own Id: OTP-9791

Improvements and New Features

Variables are now now allowed in 'fun M:F/A' as suggested by Richard O'Keefe in EEP-23.

The representation of 'fun M:F/A' in the abstract format has been changed in an incompatible way. Tools that directly read or manipulate the abstract format (such as parse transforms) may need to be updated. The compiler can handle both the new and the old format (i.e. extracting the abstract format from a pre-R15 BEAM file and compiling it using compile:forms/1,2 will work). The syntax_tools application can also handle both formats.

*** POTENTIAL INCOMPATIBILITY ***

Own Id: OTP-9643

Tuple funs (a two-element tuple with a module name and a function) are now officially deprecated and will be removed in R16. Use 'fun M:F/A' instead. To make you aware that your system uses tuple funs, the very first time a tuple fun is applied, a warning will be sent to the error logger.

Own Id: OTP-9649

Eliminate use of deprecated regexp module

Own Id: OTP-9810

Tools 2.6.6.5

Fixed Bugs and Malfunctions

Teach the emacs mode to compile yecc and leex files

If visiting a .yrl or .xrl file in emacs with erlang-mode, then the `erlang-compile' function (normally bound to C-c C-k), now knows how to compile yecc and leex files, and then, if that compilation succeeds, also compiles the resulting .erl files.

Also introduce a `erlang-compile-command-function-alist' to make it possible to hook in other functions for computing compilation commands/expressions, depending on file name. (Thanks to Tomas Abrahamsson )

Own Id: OTP-9503

Improvements and New Features

Bugs in xref(3) have been fixed. (Thanks to Matthias Lang.)

Own Id: OTP-9416

Tools 2.6.6.4

Fixed Bugs and Malfunctions

Change make:files to behave more like erlc

This change removes the unnecessary checks on the files when make:files is called and allows the error checking to be done in compile:file, where the error messages are produced. It does not affect the return value.

(Thanks to Sam bobroff)

Own Id: OTP-9179

add user specified compiler options on form reloading

In order to be able to test non-exported functions from another (test) module it is necessary to compile the specific module (at least during the test phase) with the export_all compiler option. This allows complete separation of testing and productive code. At the moment it is not possible to combine this with a test code coverage using the cover module. The problem is that when cover compiling a module using cover:compile_* the code is reloaded into the emulator omitting/filtering the passed user options. In my example above the export_all option would be removed and the non-exported functions cannot be called any more. (Thanks to Tobias Schlager)

Own Id: OTP-9204

Inhibit electric newline after "->" when inside a type spec

The Erlang mode for Emacs inserts a newline after every "->", which saves you one keystroke when writing a function, but that is inappropriate when writing a type spec, as you'd normally keep the spec on one line. This change inhibits the automatic insertion when the current line starts with "-spec" or "-type".(Thanks to Magnus Henoch)

Own Id: OTP-9255

Add a check logic to prevent file descriptor leak

cover module handle files as raw in export and import. Assert counts of ports are the same at the beginning and at the end of the test case.(Thanks to Shunichi Shinohara)

Own Id: OTP-9300

Tools 2.6.6.3

Fixed Bugs and Malfunctions

Declare indentation options as "safe" in erlang-mode for Emacs

Emacs has a facility for setting options on a per-file basis based on comments in the source file. By default, all options are considered "unsafe", and the user is queried before the variable is set. This patch declares the variables erlang-indent-level, erlang-indent-guard and erlang-argument-indent to be safe, if the value specified in the source file is valid.

Such declarations usually look like this:

%% -*- erlang-indent-level: 2 -*-

and appear on the first line of the file. (thanks to Magnus Henoch)

Own Id: OTP-9122

Improvements and New Features

Cover has been improved to take less memory and allow parallel analysis of cover data. Data collection from nodes is now done in parallel and it is now possible to issue multiple analyse and analyse_to_file requests at the same time. A new function call async_analyse_to_file has also been introduced, see the documentation for more details.

Own Id: OTP-9043 Aux Id: seq11771

Tools 2.6.6

Fixed Bugs and Malfunctions

A race condition affecting Cover has been removed.

Own Id: OTP-8469

Emacs improvements:

Fixed emacs-mode installation problems.

Fixed a couple of -spec and -type indentation and font-lock problems.

Fixed error messages on emacs-21.

Magnus Henoch fixed several issues.

Ralf Doering, Klas Johansson and Chris Bernard contributed various emacs-eunit improvements.

Klas Johansson and Dave Peticolas added emacs-flymake support.

Own Id: OTP-8530

Improvements and New Features

Xref has been updated to use the re module instead of the deprecated regexp module.

*** POTENTIAL INCOMPATIBILITY ***

Own Id: OTP-8472

When given the option {builtins,true} Xref now adds calls to operators.

Own Id: OTP-8647

eprof has been reimplemented with support in the Erlang virtual machine and is now both faster (i.e. slows down the code being measured less) and scales much better. In measurements we saw speed-ups compared to the old eprof ranging from 6 times (for sequential code that only uses one scheduler/core) up to 84 times (for parallel code that uses 8 cores).

Note: The API for the eprof has been cleaned up and extended. See the documentation.

*** POTENTIAL INCOMPATIBILITY ***

Own Id: OTP-8706

Tools 2.6.5.1

Fixed Bugs and Malfunctions

A bug concerning bit comprehensions has been fixed in Cover. The bug was introduced in R13B03. (Thanks to Matthew Sackman.)

Own Id: OTP-8340

Improvements and New Features

Add lock profiling tool.

The Lock profiling tool, lcnt, can make use of the internal lock statistics when the runtime system is built with this feature enabled.

This provides a mechanism to examine potential lock bottlenecks within the runtime itself.

- Add erts_debug:lock_counters({copy_save, bool()}). This option enables or disables statistics saving for destroyed processes and ets-tables. Enabling this might consume a lot of memory.

- Add id-numbering for lock classes which is otherwise undefined.

Own Id: OTP-8424

emacs: Moved code skeletons to a separate file and and added a configurable variable to choose skeleton. Thanks Dave Peticolas.

Own Id: OTP-8446

Tools 2.6.5

Fixed Bugs and Malfunctions

The coverage analysis tool cover has been improved when it comes to handling list and bit string comprehensions (a counter for each qualifier), bit syntax expressions (the Value and Size expressions), and try expressions (the body called Exprs in the Reference Manual). A few (not all) situations where several expressions are put on the same line are also handled better than before.

Own Id: OTP-8188 Aux Id: seq11397

When loading Cover compiled code on remote nodes running code in the loaded module, a badarg failure was sometimes the result. This bug has been fixed.

Own Id: OTP-8270 Aux Id: seq11423

The short-circuit operators andalso and orelse are now handled correctly by the coverage analysis tool cover (it is no longer checked that the second argument returns a Boolean value.)

Own Id: OTP-8273

Tools 2.6.1

Improvements and New Features

The documentation has been updated so as to reflect the last updates of the Erlang shell as well as the minor modifications of the control sequence p of the io_lib module.

Superfluous empty lines have been removed from code examples and from Erlang shell examples.

Own Id: OTP-6944 Aux Id: OTP-6554, OTP-6911

tuple_size/1 and byte_size/1 have been substituted for size/1.

Own Id: OTP-7009

The coverage analysis tool cover now handles the short-circuit Boolean expressions andalso/2 and orelse/2 properly.

Own Id: OTP-7095

Tools 2.5.5

Fixed Bugs and Malfunctions

Missing buffer-local declaration in erlang.el has been added. Before this fix there could arise problems in other emacs modes after visiting a buffer using the erlang mode.

Own Id: OTP-6721

Key-map for 'backward-delete-char-untabif updated to work properly with Xemacs.

Own Id: OTP-6723

Improvements and New Features

Minor updates of Xref.

Own Id: OTP-6586

Minor Makefile changes.

Own Id: OTP-6689 Aux Id: OTP-6742

"C-u C-c C-k" now does a compile with both "debug_info" and "export_all".

Own Id: OTP-6741

Tools 2.5

Fixed Bugs and Malfunctions

Fixed some bugs in make:

make:files/1,2 can now handle a file in another directory as argument, similar to make:all/0,1.

When specifying a file name including the .erl extension in Emakefile, make:all/0,1 looked for the object code in the wrong place.

When specifying a file name including the .erl extension in Emakefile and some compile options for the file, make:files/0,1 did not use the options as it should do.

Own Id: OTP-6057 Aux Id: seq10299

cover: When cover:stop() was called, the cover compiled code was not unloaded (as stated in the documentation) but simply marked as 'old'. This meant that processes lingering in (or with funs referencing to) the cover compiled code would survive even when the cover server and its ETS tables was terminated.

Now the cover compiled code is unloaded, meaning that processes lingering in/with references to it will be killed when cover:stop is called, instead of later crashing with badarg when trying to bump counters in ETS tables no longer existing.

Improvements and New Features

Replaced call to deprecated function file:file_info/1 with call to filelib:is_dir/1 and filelib:is_regular/1 in tags.erl.

Own Id: OTP-6079

Tools 2.4.6

Fixed Bugs and Malfunctions

Emacs: erlang-man-function and erlang-man-module used a pattern matching to find the requested module that sometimes yielded unexpected results. For example, erlang-man-module file would display the man page for CosFileTransfer_File.

Own Id: OTP-5746 Aux Id: seq10096

Some compiler warnings and Dialyzer warnings were eliminated in the Tools application.

When tracing to a port (which fprof does), there could be fake schedule out/schedule in messages sent for a process that had exited.

Own Id: OTP-5757

Tools 2.4.3

Improvements and New Features

It is now possible to encrypt the debug information in beam files, to help keep the source code secret. See compile(3) for how to provide the key for encrypting, and beam_lib(3) for how to provide the key for decryption so that tools such as Debugger, xref, or cover can be used.

The beam_lib:chunks/2 functions now accepts an additional chunk type 'compile_info' to retrieve the compilation information directly as a term. (Thanks to Tobias Lindahl.)

Own Id: OTP-5460 Aux Id: seq9787