Friday, June 22, 2007

Noteworthy things about Pydev 1.3.5

Ok, the new version was released yesterday, and there are a couple of things worth mentioning:

Facelifts

  • Docstrings and the pop-up window: the docs are now correctly wrapped, those whitespace columns to the left are removed and the size is kept among code-completion requests.

  • Outline: the comments handling is much better (it respects the level they should appear in, finds comments ending with '---' and sorts them by their position, even when in alphabetic order is chosen)

Another thing that had changes was the debugger (as always)... it should be working with jython (some semantics are different within python and jython regarding the tracing facility, so, it was already broken for about 3 releases -- hopefully things should be working again).

wxPython debugging also works again... it was not working correctly in the last release because pydev was keeping the latest frame from a thread alive a bit more than it should (and wxPython didn't like it). That was needed because pydev currently runs with several untraced frames, but to make them traceable again, pydev needs some way to access them (so, it kept the topmost frame available in the thread)... that access is still needed, so, 2 workarounds for that are now in place to avoid that strong reference to the topmost frame:

  • python 2.5 added support to get the running frames for all the threads in sys._current_frames(), so, this was a piece of cake (after I discovered about it).

  • Earlier versions need a different approach: a list of weak-refs to the PyDBFrame is kept (that's the class that wraps the tracing facility for a given frame) and that class has the actual frames as a strong ref (because you can't create actual weak-refs to frames)... seems like a hack for me, but the only other option required to have a compiled library to get the frames as python 2.5 does, but I didn't want to add the burden of having compiled code for different platforms (and that also didn't consider jython)

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