On Feb 9, 2008 1:30 AM, Adriaan de Groot <groot at kde.org> wrote:

> On Friday 08 February 2008 19:47, Manish Chakravarty wrote:
> > As a starting point, I want to do dynamic tracing of this application.
> > Though this app is relatively small, it demonstrates the power of Qt's
> meta
> > object system and powerful object introspection capabilities.
>
> I don't see the connection here between dtrace and the Qt meta-object
> system.
> I mean, this is a fun demo app, but what makes it special as a beginning
> for
> dtrace? Since I'm not very creative regarding what dtrace probes are
> possible, I may be missing something obvious here.

As a starting point, I want to be able to probe what is going on behind the
scenes when meta object calls are made ( and how efficient they are, getting
an idea of their time complexity, etc )

Let's say you there is a  KDE4 or Qt4 app whose UI has been designed using
the Qt Designer.
The XML .ui file is being read at run time to draw widgets and make
signal-slot connections

I know from experience that is not as efficient as drawing the UI by hand.
But how do i quantify it? I attach a probe to the QObjects that are being
instantiated at run-time. I would have an idea!

Another example: I have heard that Qt is leaking memory on Solaris ( at
least the way Qt is being built by the KDE/Solaris project)
Where exactly is it leaking memory and why? QObject has (rudimentary)
garbage collection. Why is gc not happening properly?
DTrace would provide answers.  In fact
http://developers.sun.com/solaris/articles/dtrace_cc.html demonstrates how
to catch memory leak problems in C++ apps. We need to make it more
Qt-specific ( by writing probes to the classes i mentioned in my original
mail ) to get a better idea,

And last but not the least, the ability to dynamically trace Qt apps will
help a lot of Qt/KDE developers write much better apps on the Solaris ( and
even OSX ) platform ( not sure if FreeBSD has Dtrace )

How does this idea sound?

-- Manish
monzie on #kde-solaris

>
>
> [ade]
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-- 
Manish Chakravarty
http://manish-chaks.livejournal.com/
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