Folks,
Introduced with Palm OS Emulator 3.4 were two features that you might
find interesting. I'm learning that developers are still discovering
these features, and that when they do, they're totally blown away!
Some have said that these features need more advertising, so I
thought I'd post a description of them here.
The first feature is Memory Leak Detection. As your application
makes calls to MemHandleNew, MemHandleFree, MemPtrNew, MemPtrFree,
etc., Poser takes notes on the chunks that are allocated and
de-allocated by your application. If, when your application quits,
there are still some blocks allocated that you haven't freed up,
Poser considers those "memory leaks" and will warn you about them.
It will also generate a report containing information about the
leaked blocks, including block location, block contents, and the name
of the function in your application that allocated the block (as well
as all the functions that led to that function being called, so that
you can get a sense of the context in which that block was allocated).
The second feature is Event Minimization. This feature is usually
used in conjunction with Gremlins. As of version 3.4, while running
Gremlins, Poser records to a file all of the events that get
generated. If an error occurs during the Gremlin, all of the events
that lead to that error can be found in a file in the folder created
by Gremlins. If you wanted, you could use Poser's new "Replay" menu
item to replay those exact same events. But if there are thousands
of events in the file, that could take a long time. Instead, you
would use the "Minimize" menu item on the saved event file. Minimize
kicks off a process of examining the events file, discarding any that
don't appear relevant to causing a crash. You can read the details
in the release notes, but the short of it is that you generally end
up with an event file of only a handful of events. As a final touch,
Poser converts the events in the file into English form, leaving you
with a text file with instructions ("tap here", "type this", etc.)
that will cause your application to crash.
So, there you are! I hope you find these features useful!
-- Keith Rollin
-- Palm OS Emulator engineer
--
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