View Source Debugger Release Notes

This document describes the changes made to the Debugger application.

Debugger 5.5

Fixed Bugs and Malfunctions

  • Defining a fun in the shell using the syntax fun Name/Arity would fail. This has been corrected so that the following now works:

    1> F = fun is_atom/1.
#Fun.erl.42.18682967>
> F(a).
true
3> Id = fun id/1.
#Fun.erl.42.18682967>
4> Id(42).
** exception error: undefined shell command id/1
5> id(I) -> I.
ok
6> Id(42).
42

    The Debugger has also been corrected to correctly handle this syntax for a BIF.

    Own Id: OTP-19322 Aux Id: GH-8963, PR-8987

Improvements and New Features

  • Erlang/OTP type specifications has been updated to eliminate overlapping domains.

    Own Id: OTP-19310 Aux Id: GH-8810, GH-8821, PR-8986

Debugger 5.4

Fixed Bugs and Malfunctions

  • The dependencies for this application are now listed in the app file.

    Own Id: OTP-18831 Aux Id: PR-7441

Improvements and New Features

  • Type specs have been added to all API functions.

    Own Id: OTP-18819 Aux Id: PR-7781

  • The documentation has been migrated to use Markdown and ExDoc.

    Own Id: OTP-18955 Aux Id: PR-8026

  • The Debugger now use a trace session for its internal use of tracing to avoid interfering with the user's use of tracing.

    Own Id: OTP-19074 Aux Id: PR-8389

Debugger 5.3.4

Fixed Bugs and Malfunctions

  • Guards with nested record expression could wrongly evaluate to false.

    Own Id: OTP-18958 Aux Id: GH-8120, PR-8275

Debugger 5.3.3

Fixed Bugs and Malfunctions

  • Map comprehensions now work in the Debugger.

    Own Id: OTP-18888 Aux Id: GH-7914

Debugger 5.3.2

Fixed Bugs and Malfunctions

  • The call int:no_break(Module) did not remove any breakpoints.

    Own Id: OTP-18644 Aux Id: GH-7336

  • The maybe expression is now supported in the Debugger.

    Own Id: OTP-18740 Aux Id: GH-7410, PR-7599

Debugger 5.3.1.3

Fixed Bugs and Malfunctions

  • Guards with nested record expression could wrongly evaluate to false.

    Own Id: OTP-18958 Aux Id: GH-8120, PR-8275

Debugger 5.3.1.2

Fixed Bugs and Malfunctions

  • The maybe expression is now supported in the Debugger.

    Own Id: OTP-18740 Aux Id: GH-7410, PR-7599

Debugger 5.3.1.1

Fixed Bugs and Malfunctions

  • The call int:no_break(Module) did not remove any breakpoints.

    Own Id: OTP-18644 Aux Id: GH-7336

Debugger 5.3.1

Fixed Bugs and Malfunctions

  • Fixed a bug that would cause analysis to crash.

    Own Id: OTP-18372 Aux Id: GH-6580

Debugger 5.3

Improvements and New Features

Debugger 5.2.1.1

Fixed Bugs and Malfunctions

  • The call int:no_break(Module) did not remove any breakpoints.

    Own Id: OTP-18644 Aux Id: GH-7336

Debugger 5.2.1

Fixed Bugs and Malfunctions

  • Fix record index matching, it was broken and could never match.

    Own Id: OTP-17865 Aux Id: GH-5571

Debugger 5.2

Improvements and New Features

  • Improve record handling, print known records with record syntax.

    Own Id: OTP-17574

Debugger 5.1

Improvements and New Features

  • Extended error information for failing BIF calls as proposed in EEP 54 has been implemented.

    When a BIF call from the Erlang shell fails, more information about which argument or arguments that were in error will be printed. The same extended error information will by proc_lib, common_test, and qlc when BIF calls fail.

    For applications that wish to provide the same extended error information, there are new functions erl_error:format_exception/3 and erl_error:format_exception/4.

    There is a new error/3 BIF that allows applications or libraries to provide extended error information in the same way for their own exceptions.

    Own Id: OTP-16686

Debugger 5.0

Improvements and New Features

  • EEP-52 has been implemented.

    In binary matching, the size of the segment to be matched is now allowed to be a guard expression, and similarly in map matching the keys can now be guard expressions. See the Erlang Reference Manual and Programming Examples for more details.

    Language compilers or code generators that generate Core Erlang code may need to be updated to be compatible with the compiler in OTP 23. For more details, see the section Backwards Compatibility in EEP 52.

    Own Id: OTP-14708

  • The deprecated erlang:get_stacktrace/0 BIF now returns an empty list instead of a stacktrace. To retrieve the stacktrace, use the extended try/catch syntax that was introduced in OTP 21. erlang:get_stacktrace/0 is scheduled for removal in OTP 24.

    * POTENTIAL INCOMPATIBILITY *

    Own Id: OTP-16484

Debugger 4.2.8

Fixed Bugs and Malfunctions

  • Fix a bug where Unicode atoms are printed differently depending on if integer lists are printed as strings or not.

    Own Id: OTP-16186

Debugger 4.2.7

Fixed Bugs and Malfunctions

  • All incorrect (that is, all) uses of "can not" has been corrected to "cannot" in source code comments, documentation, examples, and so on.

    Own Id: OTP-14282 Aux Id: PR-1891

Debugger 4.2.6

Fixed Bugs and Malfunctions

  • Improved documentation.

    Own Id: OTP-15190

Debugger 4.2.5

Fixed Bugs and Malfunctions

  • Fix a bug where calling a fun inside a binary would crash the Debugger.

    Own Id: OTP-14957 Aux Id: PR-1741

Debugger 4.2.4

Fixed Bugs and Malfunctions

  • Do not quote variables and button names in Debugger windows. The bug was introduced in Erlang/OTP 20.1.

    Own Id: OTP-14802

Debugger 4.2.3

Improvements and New Features

  • Tools are updated to show Unicode atoms correctly.

    Own Id: OTP-14464

Debugger 4.2.2

Fixed Bugs and Malfunctions

  • The Erlang shell, qlc:string_to_handle(), and the Debugger (the Evaluator area and Edit variable window of the Bindings area) can parse pids, ports, references, and external funs, as long as they can be created in the running system.

    Own Id: OTP-14296

  • Fix editing of simple binary values in the Bindings area of the Debugger's Attach Process Window.

    Own Id: OTP-14318

Improvements and New Features

  • Miscellaneous updates due to atoms containing arbitrary Unicode characters.

    Own Id: OTP-14285

Debugger 4.2.1

Fixed Bugs and Malfunctions

  • Update build scripts to not make assumptions about where env, cp and perl are located.

    Own Id: OTP-13800

  • A bug causing non-interpreted code to crash the debugger has been fixed.

    Own Id: OTP-13756

Debugger 4.2

Improvements and New Features

  • When the debugger searches for source files, it will also use the location of the source in the compilation information part of the BEAM file.

    Own Id: OTP-13375

Debugger 4.1.2

Improvements and New Features

  • Documentation corrections.

    Own Id: OTP-12994

Debugger 4.1.1

Fixed Bugs and Malfunctions

  • Fix crash when starting a quick debugging session. Thanks Alan Duffield.

    Own Id: OTP-12911 Aux Id: seq12906

Debugger 4.1

Improvements and New Features

  • Support variables as Map keys in expressions and patterns

    Erlang will accept any expression as keys in Map expressions and it will accept literals or bound variables as keys in Map patterns.

    Own Id: OTP-12218

Debugger 4.0.3

Fixed Bugs and Malfunctions

  • Fix save state which did not work on Mac.

    Own Id: OTP-12378

Debugger 4.0.2

Fixed Bugs and Malfunctions

  • Make sure to install .hrl files when needed

    Own Id: OTP-12197

  • Invoking debugger functions ia/1 and iaa/1 crashed, when it tried to invoke the old and removed gs based gui functions.

    Own Id: OTP-12357

Debugger 4.0.1

Fixed Bugs and Malfunctions

  • Fix evaluation of map updates in the debugger and erl_eval

    Reported-by: José Valim

    Own Id: OTP-11922

Debugger 4.0

Fixed Bugs and Malfunctions

  • The debugger now correctly evaluates code such as 'X = true andalso X'. (Thanks to Anthony Ramine.)

    Own Id: OTP-11553

  • A few subtle bugs in the evaluation of code in the debugger has been corrected. (Thanks to Anthony Ramine.)

    Own Id: OTP-11676

  • 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

Improvements and New Features

  • Removed gs based applications and gs based backends. The observer application replaces the removed applications.

    * POTENTIAL INCOMPATIBILITY *

    Own Id: OTP-10915

  • Support Maps syntax in debugger (Thanks to Anthony Ramine).

    Own Id: OTP-11673

Debugger 3.2.12

Improvements and New Features

  • Fix matching of floating point middle-endian machines. Thanks to Johannes Weissl.

    Own Id: OTP-11201

Debugger 3.2.11

Improvements and New Features

  • A new checkbox has been added. When it is checked, the range set by the erl flag +pc is used for determining when to print lists of integers as strings. When it is unchecked, integer lists are never printed as strings.

    A minor incompatibility: settings saved by Erlang R16B01 or later cannot be read by Erlang R16B or earlier.

    Own Id: OTP-10899

  • Erlang source files with non-ASCII characters are now encoded in UTF-8 (instead of latin1).

    Own Id: OTP-11041 Aux Id: OTP-10907

Debugger 3.2.10

Improvements and New Features

  • The +pc flag to erl can be used to set the range of characters considered printable. This affects how the shell and io:format("~tp",...) functionality does heuristic string detection. More can be read in STDLIB users guide.

    Own Id: OTP-10884

Debugger 3.2.9

Fixed Bugs and Malfunctions

  • Fix Debugger settings dialog due to changed behavior in wxFileDialog (Thanks to Håkan Mattsson)

    Own Id: OTP-10621

Improvements and New Features

  • Support for Unicode has been implemented.

    Own Id: OTP-10302

  • 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

  • Integer lists and utf-8 binaries in variables are now displayed as strings.

    Own Id: OTP-10679

Debugger 3.2.8

Fixed Bugs and Malfunctions

  • Fixed disappearing breakpoints bug, reported by Ricardo Catalinas Jiménez.

    Own Id: OTP-9950

Debugger 3.2.7

Fixed Bugs and Malfunctions

  • Fix "OK" spelling in debugger messages and variables

    Simple code refactor in the debugger: renames all the occurrences of "Ok" to "OK" in the code, variable names and strings. This improves the consistency of the code and follows the GTK UI where "OK" is always used.(Thanks to Ricardo Catalinas Jiménez)

    Own Id: OTP-9699

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

Debugger 3.2.6

Improvements and New Features

  • Fix issues reported by dialyzer.

    Own Id: OTP-9107

Debugger 3.2.5

Improvements and New Features

  • Miscellaneous updates

    Own Id: OTP-8976

Debugger 3.2.4

Improvements and New Features

  • Type specs have been added/cleaned up. (Thanks to Kostis Sagonas.)

    Own Id: OTP-8757

Debugger 3.2.3

Improvements and New Features

  • Warnings due to new autoimported BIFs removed

    Own Id: OTP-8674 Aux Id: OTP-8579

  • The predefined builtin type tid() has been removed. Instead, ets:tid() should be used.

    * POTENTIAL INCOMPATIBILITY *

    Own Id: OTP-8687

Debugger 3.2.2

Fixed Bugs and Malfunctions

  • Bugs have been fixed in the evaluation of comprehensions and short-circuit expressions in guards.

    Own Id: OTP-8310

Improvements and New Features

  • Miscellaneous corrections of the WX version of the debugger.

    Own Id: OTP-8346

Debugger 3.2.1

Improvements and New Features

  • The documentation is now built with open source tools (xsltproc and fop) that exists on most platforms. One visible change is that the frames are removed.

    Own Id: OTP-8201

Debugger 3.2

Improvements and New Features

  • Added a new gui, start with debugger:start(gs) for old gui.

    Own Id: OTP-7366

  • The undocumented, unsupported, and deprecated guard BIF is_constant/1 has been removed.

    * INCOMPATIBILITY with R12B *

    Own Id: OTP-7673

Debugger 3.1.1.4

Improvements and New Features

  • There is now experimental support for loading of code from archive files. See the documentation of code, init, erl_prim_loaderand escript for more info.

    The error handling of escripts has been improved.

    An escript may now set explicit arguments to the emulator, such as -smp enabled.

    An escript may now contain a precompiled beam file.

    An escript may now contain an archive file containing one or more applications (experimental).

    The internal module code_aux has been removed.

    Own Id: OTP-7548 Aux Id: otp-6622

Debugger 3.1.1.3

Improvements and New Features

  • Minor changes.

    Own Id: OTP-7388

Debugger 3.1.1.2

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

Debugger 3.1.1.1

Improvements and New Features

  • Minor Makefile changes.

    Own Id: OTP-6689

  • Obsolete guard tests (such as list()) have been replaced with the modern guard tests (such as is_list()).

    Own Id: OTP-6725

Debugger 3.1.1

Fixed Bugs and Malfunctions

  • Removed some dead code from dbg_ieval.

    Own Id: OTP-6552

Debugger 3.1

Fixed Bugs and Malfunctions

  • The interpreter could not handle the case where an expression that should evaluate to a fun referred to uninterpreted code.

    Own Id: OTP-6061 Aux Id: seq10295

  • Timeout for gen_server calls within Debugger is now set to infinity.

    Own Id: OTP-6103

Improvements and New Features

  • Notification windows are now centered over a parent window.

    Own Id: OTP-6011 Aux Id: OTP-5987

  • When interpreting a module, it is now checked that the module does not belong to the Kernel, STDLIB, GS or Debugger application, as interpreting a module used by the debugger/interpreter itself will lead to a deadlock or emulator crash.

    Also int:interpretable(Mod) has been extended to return {error,{app,App}} if Mod belongs to one of the above applications.

    Own Id: OTP-6020

  • andalso/orelse is now supported.

    Own Id: OTP-6021 Aux Id: OTP-5894

Debugger 3.0.1

Fixed Bugs and Malfunctions

  • When evaluating a guard expression for a fun function clause, the environment variable bindings were not taken into account.

    Own Id: OTP-5837

Improvements and New Features

  • A number of smaller improvements to the GUI:

    • Multiple choices now possible in Function Break Dialog Window.
    • Right-clicking the Module entry in a Break Dialog Window will open a popup menu from which the appropriate (interpreted) module can be selected.
    • Auto Attach options can now be changed using the buttons in the left part of the Monitor Window, not only by the corresponding menu buttons.
    • Buttons for enabling and disabling all breakpoints have been added.
    • View Module Window keyboard shortcuts corrected.

    Own Id: OTP-4284

Debugger 3.0

Improvements and New Features

  • Debugger can now handle try-catch. This meant large parts of the interpreter had to be rewritten. Also, some small changes to the GUI have been made.

    Own Id: OTP-5730

Debugger 2.3.3

Improvements and New Features

  • It is now possible to encrypt the debug information in Beam files, to help keep the source code secret. See the documentation for compile on how to provide the key for encrypting, and the documentation for beam_lib on how to provide the key for decryption so that tools such as the 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

Debugger 2.3.2

Fixed Bugs and Malfunctions

  • The graphic applications now search for HTML documentation in the correct place.

    Own Id: OTP-5381

Debugger 2.3.1

Fixed Bugs and Malfunctions

  • Package support has been added to the debugger. Thanks to Richard Carlsson in the HiPE project.

    Own Id: OTP-5255

Improvements and New Features

  • Updated to handle the latest version of the compiler.

    Own Id: OTP-5265