PyDev 5.6.0 released: faster debugger, improved type inference for super and pytest fixtures

PyDev 5.6.0 is now already available for download (and is already bundled in LiClipse 3.5.0).

There are many improvements on this version!

The major one is that the PyDev.Debugger got some attention and should now be 60%-100% faster overall -- in all supported Python versions (and that's on top of the improvements done previously).

This improvement was a nice example of trading memory vs speed (the major change done was that the debugger now has 2 new caches, one for saving whether a frame should be skipped or not and another to save whether a given line in a traced frame should be skipped or not, which enables the debugger to make much less checks on those occasions).

Also, other fixes were done in the debugger. Namely:

• the variables are now properly displayed when the interactive console is connected to a debug session;
• it's possible to select the Qt version for which QThreads should be patched for the debugger to work with (in preferences > PyDev > Debug > Qt Threads);
• fixed an issue where a native Qt signal is not callable message was raised when connecting a signal to QThread.started.
• fixed issue displaying variable (Ctrl+Shift+D) when debugging.

Note: from this version onward, the debugger will now only support Python 2.6+ (I believe there should be very few Python 2.5 users -- Python 2.6 itself stopped being supported in 2013, so, I expect this change to affect almost no one -- if someone really needs to use an older version of Python, it's always possible to get an older version of the IDE/debugger too). Also, from now on, supported versions are actually properly tested on the ci (2.6, 2.7 and 3.5 in https://travis-ci.org/fabioz/PyDev.Debugger and 2.7, 3.5 in https://ci.appveyor.com/project/fabioz/pydev-debugger).

The code-completion (Ctrl+Space) and find definition (F3) also had improvements and can now deal with the Python super (so, it's possible to get completions and go to the definition of a method declared in a superclass when using the super construct) and pytest fixtures (so, if you have a pytest fixture, you should now be able to have completions/go to its definition even if you don't add a docstring to the parameter saying its expected type).

Also, this release improved the support in third-party packages, so, coverage, pycodestyle (previously pep8.py) and autopep8 now use the latest version available. Also, PyLint was improved to use the same thread pool used in code-analysis and an issue in the Django shell was fixed when django >= 1.10.

And to finish, the preferences for running unit-tests can now be saved to the project or user settings (i.e.: preferences > PyDev > PyUnit > Save to ...) and an issue was fixed when coloring the matrix multiplication operator (which was wrongly recognized as a decorator).

Thank you very much to all the PyDev supporters and Patrons (http://www.patreon.com/fabioz), who help to keep PyDev moving forward and to JetBrains, which sponsored many of the improvements done in the PyDev.Debugger.