Erlang -- Tools Release Notes

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Tools
Release Notes
Version 2.6.8

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- Tools Release Notes
  - Top of chapter
  - Tools 2.6.8
  - Tools 2.6.7
  - Tools 2.6.6.6
  - Tools 2.6.6.5
  - Tools 2.6.6.4
  - Tools 2.6.6.3
  - Tools 2.6.6.2
  - Tools 2.6.6.1
  - Tools 2.6.6
  - Tools 2.6.5.1
  - Tools 2.6.5
  - Tools 2.6.4
  - Tools 2.6.3
  - Tools 2.6.2
  - Tools 2.6.1
  - Tools 2.6
  - Tools 2.5.5
  - Tools 2.5.4.1
  - Tools 2.5.4
  - Tools 2.5.3
  - Tools 2.5.2
  - Tools 2.5.1
  - Tools 2.5
  - Tools 2.4.7
  - Tools 2.4.6
  - Tools 2.4.5
  - Tools 2.4.4
  - Tools 2.4.3
  - Tools 2.4.2
  - Tools 2.4.1

# 1 Tools Release Notes

This document describes the changes made to the Tools application.

### 1.1 Tools 2.6.8

#### Fixed Bugs and Malfunctions

- The last tuple fun call has been removed from fprof.

  Own Id: OTP-10091 Aux Id: seq12067

- Fix indentation of record fields in Emacs (Thanks to Tomas Abrahamsson)

  Own Id: OTP-10120

- Documentation fixes (Thanks to Ricardo Catalinas Jiménez )

  Own Id: OTP-10121

- Remove Erlang-specific compilation error regexp in erlang.el

  Own Id: OTP-10168

- Fix highlighting of atoms ending with a dollar sign

  Like this: 'atom$'. In that example, the last single quote should be recognised as ending the atom. This needs a font-lock workaround similar to the one for strings. Thanks to Magnus Henoch

  Own Id: OTP-10178

- Xref now accepts filenames with character codes greater than 126. (Thanks to Emile Joubert for reporting the issue.)

  Own Id: OTP-10192

- Add test_indentation target to lib/tools/emacs/Makefile

  Automatically indent test.erl.orig, save to test.erl, and compare to test.erl.intended. Thanks to Magnus Henoch.

  Own Id: OTP-10226

### 1.2 Tools 2.6.7

#### Fixed Bugs and Malfunctions

- Makefiles in erts, hipe and tools have been corrected to enable parallel make, i.e MAKEFLAGS=-jX where X is the parallelity number. As a result of this dependencies were corrected since that is what is needed for parallel make to work.

  Own Id: OTP-9857 Aux Id: OTP-9451

- Minor suppressions and fixes of compilation warnings

  Own Id: OTP-10016

### 1.3 Tools 2.6.6.6

#### Fixed Bugs and Malfunctions

- Update system profiling principles to reflect eprof performance improvements.

  Own Id: OTP-9656

- [cover] fix leftover {'DOWN', ..} msg in callers queue

  After stopping cover with cover:stop() there could still be a {'DOWN',...} leftover message in the calling process's message queue. This unexpected leftover could be eliminated if erlang:demonitor/2 with option flush would be used in certain points

  Own Id: OTP-9694

- Add deps as erlang-flymake include directory.

  Update erlang-flymake to recognize the "deps" folder as an include directory. This makes erlang-flymake compatible with the rebar dependency management tool's default folder structure, which puts included dependencies in "deps".(Thanks to Kevin Albrecht)

  Own Id: OTP-9791

#### 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

- Tuple funs (a two-element tuple with a module name and a function) are now officially deprecated and will be removed in R16. Use 'fun M:F/A' instead. To make you aware that your system uses tuple funs, the very first time a tuple fun is applied, a warning will be sent to the error logger.

  Own Id: OTP-9649

- Eliminate use of deprecated regexp module

  Own Id: OTP-9810

### 1.4 Tools 2.6.6.5

#### Fixed Bugs and Malfunctions

- Teach the emacs mode to compile yecc and leex files

  If visiting a .yrl or .xrl file in emacs with erlang-mode, then the `erlang-compile' function (normally bound to C-c C-k), now knows how to compile yecc and leex files, and then, if that compilation succeeds, also compiles the resulting .erl files.

  Also introduce a `erlang-compile-command-function-alist' to make it possible to hook in other functions for computing compilation commands/expressions, depending on file name. (Thanks to Tomas Abrahamsson )

  Own Id: OTP-9503

#### Improvements and New Features

- Bugs in xref(3) have been fixed. (Thanks to Matthias Lang.)

  Own Id: OTP-9416

### 1.5 Tools 2.6.6.4

#### Fixed Bugs and Malfunctions

- Change make:files to behave more like erlc

  This change removes the unnecessary checks on the files when make:files is called and allows the error checking to be done in compile:file, where the error messages are produced. It does not affect the return value.

  (Thanks to Sam bobroff)

  Own Id: OTP-9179

- add user specified compiler options on form reloading

  In order to be able to test non-exported functions from another (test) module it is necessary to compile the specific module (at least during the test phase) with the export_all compiler option. This allows complete separation of testing and productive code. At the moment it is not possible to combine this with a test code coverage using the cover module. The problem is that when cover compiling a module using cover:compile_* the code is reloaded into the emulator omitting/filtering the passed user options. In my example above the export_all option would be removed and the non-exported functions cannot be called any more. (Thanks to Tobias Schlager)

  Own Id: OTP-9204

- Inhibit electric newline after "->" when inside a type spec

  The Erlang mode for Emacs inserts a newline after every "->", which saves you one keystroke when writing a function, but that is inappropriate when writing a type spec, as you'd normally keep the spec on one line. This change inhibits the automatic insertion when the current line starts with "-spec" or "-type".(Thanks to Magnus Henoch)

  Own Id: OTP-9255

- Add a check logic to prevent file descriptor leak

  cover module handle files as raw in export and import. Assert counts of ports are the same at the beginning and at the end of the test case.(Thanks to Shunichi Shinohara)

  Own Id: OTP-9300

### 1.6 Tools 2.6.6.3

#### Fixed Bugs and Malfunctions

- Declare indentation options as "safe" in erlang-mode for Emacs

  Emacs has a facility for setting options on a per-file basis based on comments in the source file. By default, all options are considered "unsafe", and the user is queried before the variable is set. This patch declares the variables erlang-indent-level, erlang-indent-guard and erlang-argument-indent to be safe, if the value specified in the source file is valid.

  Such declarations usually look like this:

  %% -*- erlang-indent-level: 2 -*-

  and appear on the first line of the file. (thanks to Magnus Henoch)

  Own Id: OTP-9122

#### Improvements and New Features

- Cover has been improved to take less memory and allow parallel analysis of cover data. Data collection from nodes is now done in parallel and it is now possible to issue multiple analyse and analyse_to_file requests at the same time. A new function call async_analyse_to_file has also been introduced, see the documentation for more details.

  Own Id: OTP-9043 Aux Id: seq11771

### 1.7 Tools 2.6.6.2

#### Fixed Bugs and Malfunctions

- eprof: API sort mismatch has now been fixed.

  Own Id: OTP-8853

- eprof: fix division by zero in statistics

  Own Id: OTP-8963

### 1.8 Tools 2.6.6.1

#### Fixed Bugs and Malfunctions

- cover will now show ampersand characters in the source code correctly. (Thanks to Tom Moertel.)

  Own Id: OTP-8776

### 1.9 Tools 2.6.6

#### Fixed Bugs and Malfunctions

- A race condition affecting Cover has been removed.

  Own Id: OTP-8469

- Emacs improvements:

  Fixed emacs-mode installation problems.

  Fixed a couple of -spec and -type indentation and font-lock problems.

  Fixed error messages on emacs-21.

  Magnus Henoch fixed several issues.

  Ralf Doering, Klas Johansson and Chris Bernard contributed various emacs-eunit improvements.

  Klas Johansson and Dave Peticolas added emacs-flymake support.

  Own Id: OTP-8530

#### Improvements and New Features

- Xref has been updated to use the re module instead of the deprecated regexp module.

  *** POTENTIAL INCOMPATIBILITY ***

  Own Id: OTP-8472

- When given the option {builtins,true} Xref now adds calls to operators.

  Own Id: OTP-8647

- eprof has been reimplemented with support in the Erlang virtual machine and is now both faster (i.e. slows down the code being measured less) and scales much better. In measurements we saw speed-ups compared to the old eprof ranging from 6 times (for sequential code that only uses one scheduler/core) up to 84 times (for parallel code that uses 8 cores).

  Note: The API for the eprof has been cleaned up and extended. See the documentation.

  *** POTENTIAL INCOMPATIBILITY ***

  Own Id: OTP-8706

### 1.10 Tools 2.6.5.1

#### Fixed Bugs and Malfunctions

- A bug concerning bit comprehensions has been fixed in Cover. The bug was introduced in R13B03. (Thanks to Matthew Sackman.)

  Own Id: OTP-8340

#### Improvements and New Features

- Add lock profiling tool.

  The Lock profiling tool, lcnt, can make use of the internal lock statistics when the runtime system is built with this feature enabled.

  This provides a mechanism to examine potential lock bottlenecks within the runtime itself.

  - Add erts_debug:lock_counters({copy_save, bool()}). This option enables or disables statistics saving for destroyed processes and ets-tables. Enabling this might consume a lot of memory.

  - Add id-numbering for lock classes which is otherwise undefined.

  Own Id: OTP-8424

- emacs: Moved code skeletons to a separate file and and added a configurable variable to choose skeleton. Thanks Dave Peticolas.

  Own Id: OTP-8446

### 1.11 Tools 2.6.5

#### Fixed Bugs and Malfunctions

- The coverage analysis tool cover has been improved when it comes to handling list and bit string comprehensions (a counter for each qualifier), bit syntax expressions (the Value and Size expressions), and try expressions (the body called Exprs in the Reference Manual). A few (not all) situations where several expressions are put on the same line are also handled better than before.

  Own Id: OTP-8188 Aux Id: seq11397

- When loading Cover compiled code on remote nodes running code in the loaded module, a badarg failure was sometimes the result. This bug has been fixed.

  Own Id: OTP-8270 Aux Id: seq11423

- The short-circuit operators andalso and orelse are now handled correctly by the coverage analysis tool cover (it is no longer checked that the second argument returns a Boolean value.)

  Own Id: OTP-8273

### 1.12 Tools 2.6.4

#### Fixed Bugs and Malfunctions

- cover now properly escapes greater-than and less-than characters in comments in HTML reports. (Thanks to Magnus Henoch.)

  Own Id: OTP-7939

### 1.13 Tools 2.6.3

#### Improvements and New Features

- xref:start/1 does now allow anonymous XREF processes to be started

  Own Id: OTP-7831

### 1.14 Tools 2.6.2

#### Fixed Bugs and Malfunctions

- A bug in the Xref scanner has been fixed.

  Own Id: OTP-7423

- A bug in Fprof where the function 'undefined' appeared to call 'undefined' has been corrected.

  Own Id: OTP-7509

### 1.15 Tools 2.6.1

#### 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

- tuple_size/1 and byte_size/1 have been substituted for size/1.

  Own Id: OTP-7009

- The coverage analysis tool cover now handles the short-circuit Boolean expressions andalso/2 and orelse/2 properly.

  Own Id: OTP-7095

### 1.16 Tools 2.6

#### Fixed Bugs and Malfunctions

- The cover tool could use huge amounts of memory when used in a distributed system.

  Own Id: OTP-6758

### 1.17 Tools 2.5.5

#### Fixed Bugs and Malfunctions

- Missing buffer-local declaration in erlang.el has been added. Before this fix there could arise problems in other emacs modes after visiting a buffer using the erlang mode.

  Own Id: OTP-6721

- Key-map for 'backward-delete-char-untabif updated to work properly with Xemacs.

  Own Id: OTP-6723

#### Improvements and New Features

- Minor updates of Xref.

  Own Id: OTP-6586

- Minor Makefile changes.

  Own Id: OTP-6689 Aux Id: OTP-6742

- "C-u C-c C-k" now does a compile with both "debug_info" and "export_all".

  Own Id: OTP-6741

### 1.18 Tools 2.5.4.1

#### Improvements and New Features

- Changes due to internal interface changes in the erts application which are needed at compile-time. No functionality has been changed.

  Own Id: OTP-6611 Aux Id: OTP-6580

### 1.19 Tools 2.5.4

#### Fixed Bugs and Malfunctions

- Made change to support the function erlang-find-tag for xemacs and emacs-21.

  Own Id: OTP-6512

#### Improvements and New Features

- Minor updates of xref for future compatibility.

  Own Id: OTP-6513

### 1.20 Tools 2.5.3

#### Fixed Bugs and Malfunctions

- eprof did not work reliably in the SMP emulator, because the trace receiver process could not process the trace messages fast enough. Therefore, eprof now blocks the other schedulers while profiling.

  Own Id: OTP-6373

### 1.21 Tools 2.5.2

#### Fixed Bugs and Malfunctions

- Fprof traces could become truncated for the SMP emulator. This bug has now been corrected.

  Own Id: OTP-6246

### 1.22 Tools 2.5.1

#### Fixed Bugs and Malfunctions

- eprof now works somewhat better in the SMP emulator.

  Own Id: OTP-6152

### 1.23 Tools 2.5

#### Fixed Bugs and Malfunctions

- Fixed some bugs in make:

  make:files/1,2 can now handle a file in another directory as argument, similar to make:all/0,1.

  When specifying a file name including the .erl extension in Emakefile, make:all/0,1 looked for the object code in the wrong place.

  When specifying a file name including the .erl extension in Emakefile and some compile options for the file, make:files/0,1 did not use the options as it should do.

  Own Id: OTP-6057 Aux Id: seq10299

- cover: When cover:stop() was called, the cover compiled code was not unloaded (as stated in the documentation) but simply marked as 'old'. This meant that processes lingering in (or with funs referencing to) the cover compiled code would survive even when the cover server and its ETS tables was terminated.

  Now the cover compiled code is unloaded, meaning that processes lingering in/with references to it will be killed when cover:stop is called, instead of later crashing with badarg when trying to bump counters in ETS tables no longer existing.

#### Improvements and New Features

- Replaced call to deprecated function file:file_info/1 with call to filelib:is_dir/1 and filelib:is_regular/1 in tags.erl.

  Own Id: OTP-6079

### 1.24 Tools 2.4.7

#### Fixed Bugs and Malfunctions

- A bug in fprof profiling causing erroneous inconsistent trace failure has been corrected.

  Own Id: OTP-5922 Aux Id: seq10203

### 1.25 Tools 2.4.6

#### Fixed Bugs and Malfunctions

- Emacs: erlang-man-function and erlang-man-module used a pattern matching to find the requested module that sometimes yielded unexpected results. For example, erlang-man-module file would display the man page for CosFileTransfer_File.

  Own Id: OTP-5746 Aux Id: seq10096

- Some compiler warnings and Dialyzer warnings were eliminated in the Tools application.

  When tracing to a port (which fprof does), there could be fake schedule out/schedule in messages sent for a process that had exited.

  Own Id: OTP-5757

### 1.26 Tools 2.4.5

#### Fixed Bugs and Malfunctions

- The cross reference tool xref did not handle the new fun M:F/A construct properly. This problem has been fixed.

  Own Id: OTP-5653

### 1.27 Tools 2.4.4

#### Fixed Bugs and Malfunctions

- The cover tool did not escape '<' and '>' not being part of HTML tags in HTML log files.

  Own Id: OTP-5588

### 1.28 Tools 2.4.3

#### Improvements and New Features

- It is now possible to encrypt the debug information in beam files, to help keep the source code secret. See compile(3) for how to provide the key for encrypting, and beam_lib(3) for how to provide the key for decryption so that tools such as 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

### 1.29 Tools 2.4.2

#### Fixed Bugs and Malfunctions

- The cover tool could not analyze empty modules on module level.

  Own Id: OTP-5418

### 1.30 Tools 2.4.1

#### Fixed Bugs and Malfunctions

- The xref analysis locals_not_used could return too many functions. This problem has been fixed.

  Own Id: OTP-5071

- The cover tool could not always compile parse transformed modules. This problem has been fixed.

  Own Id: OTP-5305