Monthly Archives: September 2009

prototype unified JavaScript/C++ back-traces for Mozilla in (archer) gdb

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As far as I know (and ignoring my previous efforts on chroniquery along these lines), up until now you had your C/C++ Mozilla backtraces via gdb (chocolate) and your JS backtraces via “call DumpJSStack()” or the debugger keyword from within JS (peanut butter), but these two great flavors had never come together to make a lot of money for dentists.

The screenshots (which is actually just one screenshot split in two) show invocation of a custom python gdb command building on my previous exciting pretty gdb commands.  The command has filtered out boring JS interpreter / XPConnect code and interleaved exciting interesting JS stack frames.

The implementation is reasonably simple and intended to be able to be implemented using VProbes to support my recent performance work along those lines.  We walk stack frames the usual way.  Ahead of time, we have marked out the PC ranges of interesting JS interpreter functions (js_Interpret and js_Execute).  If the stack frame’s instruction pointer is in one of those functions we grab the JSContext argument.  We pop frames until we reach the native frame those functions allocate from their own stack space (whose boundaries we know from the stack walking).

There is one trick we have to do involving dormantFrameChain.  While js_Execute has a consistent and straightforward usage of JS_SaveFrameChain, XPConnect and its quickstub friends are more complex.  Right now we use a dumb heuristic that just looks if our frame pointer is 0 and there is a dormantFrameChain, and in that case we restore it.  (Thankfully the garbage collector needs to know about the shelved frames, otherwise we might have to chase frames down.)  I haven’t put much effort into thinking about it, but the heurstic seems a bit reckless.  We could likely just concurrently walk the XPConnect context stack to figure out when to restore dormant frame chains.  The existing VProbe JS stack (only) code already goes to the horrible effort to get at the thread-local stack, so it wouldn’t be too much more work.  Things probably also fall down during garbage collection right now.

Hg repository is here.  Under no circumstances try to use this with jblandy’s excellent archer-mozilla JS magic right now.  The current code is very distrustful of gdb.Value in a dumb way and does exceedingly dangerous things wherein pointers are bounced to strings and back to integers because direct integer coercion is forbidden.  With pretty printers installed this is likely to break.  Also, this is all only tested on 1.9.1.

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So’s your facet: Faceted global search for Mozilla Thunderbird

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Following in the footsteps of the MIT SIMILE project’s Exhibit tool (originally authored by David Huynh) and Thunderbird Seek extension (again by David Huynh), we are hoping to land faceted global search for Thunderbird 3.0 (a la gloda) in beta 4.

I think it’s important to point out how ridiculously awesome the Seek extension is.  It is the only example of faceted browsing or search in an e-mail client that I am aware of.  (Note: I have to assume there are some research e-mail clients out there with faceting, but I haven’t seen them.)  Given the data model available to extensions in Thunderbird 2.0 and the idiosyncratic architecture of the UI code in 2.0, it’s not only a feature marvel but also a technical marvel.

Unfortunately, there was only so much Seek could do before it hit a wall given the limitations it had to work with.  Thunderbird 2.0’s per-folder indices are just that, per-folder.  They also require (fast) O(n) search on any attribute other than their unique key.  Although Seek populated an in-memory index for each folder, it was faced with having to implement its own global indexer and persistent database.

Gloda is now at a point where a global database should no longer be the limiting factor for extensions, or the core Thunderbird experience…

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The screenshots are of a fulltext search for “gloda” in my message store.  The first screenshot is without any facets applied and me hovering over one of David Ascher’s e-mail address.  The second is after having selected the “!action” tag and hovering over one of David Bienvenu’s e-mail address.  Gloda has a concept of contact aggregation of identities but owing to a want of UI for this in the address-book right now, it doesn’t happen.  We do not yet coalesce (approximately) duplicate messages, which explains any apparent duplicates you see.

The current state of things is a result of development effort by myself and David Ascher with design input from Bryan Clark and Andreas Nilsson (with hopefully much more to come soon :).  Although we aren’t using much code from our previous exptoolbar efforts, a lot of the thinking is based on the work David, Bryan, and myself did on that.  Much thanks to Kent James, Siddharth Agarwal, and David Bienvenu for their recent and ongoing improvements to the gloda (and mailnews) back-end which help make this hopefully compelling UI feature actually usable through efficient and comprehensive indexing that does not make you want to throw your computer through a window.

If you use linux or OS X, I just linked you to try server builds.  The windows try server was sadly on fire and so couldn’t attend the build party.  The bug tracking the enhancement is bug 474711 and has repository info if you want to spin your own build.  New try server builds will also be noted there.  Please keep in mind that this is an in-progress development effort; it is not finished, there are bugs.  Accordingly, please direct any feedback/discussion to the dev-apps-thunderbird list / newsgroup rather than the bug.  Please beware that increases in awesomeness require that your gloda database be automatically blown away if you try the new version.  And first you have to turn gloda on if you have not already.