&WhiteBox https://fxtwitter.com/whitebox_sys/status/1734239475176296811
Ctrl + =
/Ctrl + -
)SIGWINCH
- change window size)Compiler > Reset (Ctrl+Shift+R)
forces them to be reset.Get access to the latest version here: https://azmr.itch.io/whitebox
N.B. If you were on the WhiteBox discord (https://chat.whitebox.systems) you'd have known about this last week ๐
New &WhiteBox feature: call stacks!
Each level shows the arguments that function was called with, and the return value if it was recorded.
They're currently aligned to the inspected function, but this is likely to change as we move toward inspecting multiple functions at once.
On request from a non-HMN user, I've just added a right-click option to &WhiteBox for copying values from the timeline.
This can then be fed back into the function caller to rerun, starting with the given value (for simple data, not pointer nests)...
(N.B. it copies the value with the current formatting, so to make it a valid C initializer Struct member names
needs to be disabled)
@philliptrudeau has done some great work adding a DirectWrite backend for the text rendering in &WhiteBox: small text now looks much better!
(ideally viewed at 100%)
I spent some extra time on this at the end of last week getting &WhiteBox's disassembly jump lines to merge when they have the same destination.
I'm quite pleased with how much it improves the overall legibility of the potential jumps.
Can you spot the codegen oddity in the disassembly?
Thanks to some prompting from @megawolf, the jumps in &WhiteBox's disassembly view are now also coloured by direction
I just added the option to use Intel syntax (as well as AT&T) in &WhiteBox's disassembly, as well as arrows showing the destination of each jump (unconditional jumps are brighter than conditional jumps)
A user got &WhiteBox working with @raysan5's raylib, and I realised I hadn't tried it yet myself. This was something that needed correcting immediately!
It became possible with the concurrency features @philliptrudeau worked hard to get into v0.116.0
There are still things to hammer out from the previous interaction model (when to rerun the code, LOD, recording selection...)
But take a look:
live, graphed data & an instant edit-run loop for games!
raylib made this very easy:
-I[...]/raylib/include
to the compiler flags[...]/raylib/lib/raylib.dll
to the DLLs listโป๏ธ WhiteBox v0.116.0 released!
Some highlights:
Huge thanks to @philliptrudeau for all the work he's done for this release ๐
See the devlog for more details: https://azmr.itch.io/whitebox/devlog/563116/whitebox-v01160
&WhiteBox now has a pretty good heuristic for determining uninitialized values, which means we can show them as distinct and not include them in min/max stats: ๐ฅณ
e.g. k
is uninit until line 8 finishes
&WhiteBox now has a pretty good heuristic for determining uninitialized values, which means we can show them as distinct and not include them in min/max stats: ๐ฅณ
&WhiteBox timeline data visualisation part 3: using de-emphasis for the "non-value" part of the bar instead of emphasis for "value" part itself. To me this reduces visual noise, but I'd like to hear thoughts from others. The value colour is what was the normal bar colour... it might be worth increasing the contrast somewhat.
Importantly, it also obscures the text less.
(Ignore the fact that [line]
is coloured as it was previously, synthetic values need to be handled slightly differently)
&WhiteBox Noticed a bug in the previous image as I was writing about unit size: there's an off-by-"1" in max value for floats, which visually halves the 0.0-0.9 range shown.
This is now fixed:
&WhiteBox Noticed a bug in the previous image as I was writing about unit size: there's an off-by-"1" in max value, which visually halves the 0-1 range shown.
This is now fixed:
&WhiteBox timeline data visualisation part 2: lines for integral values have a height based on the span/range of values for that expression. This is particularly useful for expressions with small ranges like booleans!
This is meaningful because integers have a "unit size" of 1, but floats don't really have that. I could use "smallest non-zero exponent" or "smallest difference between values" or even "ordinal rank of all seen values (sorted)". The last of these would work for integers as well with large ranges but few values. It's better for distinguishing between values but not so good at making the actual value perceptually apparent.
&WhiteBox timeline data visualisation, part 1: horizontal lines indicating value for primitive types
&WhiteBox is prepping to go native, reading PDBs for arbitrary executables in place of the DWARF it generates internally.
Unsurprisingly, @NeGate has been doing a great job on this! ๐
Here's WhiteBox inspecting its own PDB functions, showing line info & local variables
&WhiteBox Handmade Seattle demo is now public
https://twitter.com/whitebox_sys/status/1598824487084068864
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=mNFDr33NbyQ
&WhiteBox
https://twitter.com/whitebox_sys/status/1577053893150019584
I've been working my way through the ANSI control codes standard (+ extras) for WhiteBox's new in-built console.
We're capturing stdout & stderr from the user's process, reading ~all controls & handling more graphical ones than many terminals!
Can yours do curly red underlines?
&WhiteBox https://twitter.com/whitebox_sys/status/1573418093531271169
Just playing around with a WIP build of WhiteBox after @phillip_trudeau has made some upgrades.
I'm really enjoying taking advantage of this breakout, full-width timeline ๐
(thanks to @ocornut for Dear ImGui + docking + viewports!)
I added a red line to the end of the &WhiteBox timeline when a run had an error that prevented the function from returning.
I also fixed the status message telling you what line the error occurred on.
(There's a new release coming very, very soon!)
I had a few minutes spare this morning so I rushed out a summary video of how MetaDocs is looking after the jam (apologies for lack of polish, I didn't have time to plan it out fully): https://youtu.be/kKppU0zcXjM
Highlights:
Still to finish:
Mid-jam dev videos:
7: https://youtu.be/hgyVoYQeHFM
8: https://youtu.be/bujTibgXY5Y
9: https://youtu.be/TGmjuB506ww
&WhiteBox now has a welcome screen with instructions on how to install the plugin for each editor, thanks to @BaremetalBaron
I'm really excited about this update to &WhiteBox - it adds the ability to call into other functions in your code (not just the function that's being recorded).
This means you can call main()
(or something else that calls your function) and see how your function behaves with all of the parameters & extra context from runtime without having to input them manually.
It's now at a point where this seems to be working, it just needs to do a little tidying up after itself...
Reworked &WhiteBox's recording of the running process' memory to be faster, simpler, and to better capture pages changing protection/accessibility
I haven't shown much for &WhiteBox recently as it's all been pretty non-visual. Here's a little expression builder I made on stream for debugging expression evaluations.
It shows the value of that expression at a given sample of the run as well as a list of all the times the value changed during the run.
Having it as a builder means that I can enforce the validity of the expression, and it also means I don't have to handle shadowed variables with the same identifier as you would for text parsing. It's a little less clear how identities should be handled when taking a large span of time into account instead of just a single instant, so this lets me defer decisions about that.
WhiteBox (real-time debugger) GUI improvement: limiting variables on the timeline to only show the time ranges when they're in-scope (implemented on stream).
@martijn I know you wanted to see this ๐
quick new UI mini-feature for WhiteBox: see all the points in the execution timeline that correspond to a location in the code (i.e. there's a highlight for every time the instruction pointer hits the code under the cursor)
I was cheating a bit before by determining what functions need to be compiled before starting to run.
I've improved the communication between the processes running & overseeing the code execution:
WhiteBox now has the option to defer a function's compilation until the first time it's called.
This opens up possibilities for optimization as well as adds support for using function pointers ๐
"WhiteBox ANNIHALATES Visual Studio in an EPIC debugger showdown"
hmm maybe too much...
"How the real-time feedback of WhiteBox will revolutionize the way you program"
... is this marketing? Am I doing it yet? ๐
This compares the process of getting feedback for a simple problem from a normal debugger and with WhiteBox. This is fairly low-hanging fruit as far as improvements go (conceptually at least), but I think it shows how much quicker & easier feedback should be for at least the common cases of writing code.
Jump to 1:20 if you just want to see how WhiteBox looks in use
It's been a while since I added any new features to WhiteBox (my real-time debugger), and I've been intending to implement a data timeline for ages: here it is in an early form ๐
People who've preordered will be getting a version of this in the next couple of days to start playing with.
I now have loads of information fairly easily queryable for adding new representations like this, before we even get to different types of data that we can collect!
I've just added a new feature to WhiteBox (my live code debugger/previsualizer) that's really been missing - the ability to add a length component to pointers, so that they can be treated as arrays ๐
For those unfamiliar, a quick overview of what's being shown here:
array
because both are seen at some point in the run when the instruction pointer reaches the cursorI also realised there aren't any new features to add before I send out to the preorderers! I just have a few things to tidy up and then we're good to go ๐
If you'd like to be one of the vanguard with imminent access to the (buggy) alpha version, you can preorder WhiteBox with a 35% discount here https://azmr.itch.io/whitebox
I've started to update the colourscheme for WhiteBox (my live code debugger/previsualizer).
(I've yet to update the graphs)
red highlights data changed in statement before the editor cursor position
blue (and the graph) is showing all of the changes for a given variable
WhiteBox (live code previsualizer/debugger) now has global & per-variable data print options (proper cascading options and more UI feedback coming soon)
Variables that change in a loop shown inline - now working with struct members and eliding elements between the top and bottom 3 (easily changed to more/less)
Note the cursor is on line 11, before data.num
has been set. Correspondingly, in the #
(change number) column, there is one remaining change in value for data.num
(which also means there's another change for data
).
(if you're wondering why i
has 33 values, it's because it's also recording after the final ++i
, at which point the loop exits)
I added inline displaying of loop-value changes to WhiteBox. It's on it's way to something useful but definitely still needs some tuning
It's been a little while since my last devlog, so here's an update on some of the progress I've made.
Right, after some feedback from a few people and with the perspective of a new day I decided that my previous video was unreasonably difficult to follow, so I've reuploaded it with commentary and a visual indicator of what I'm talking about at any given time. If you found the previous version a bit lacklustre, please give this one a try: https://youtu.be/4T11-B7jXIk
Although this doesn't look like much, it represents quite a few months of work. Apologies for the silence, hopefully it makes sense. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=r7v2EcTVUVs
Progress is slow (sneaking in 20 mins here and there), but I got OpenGL working with the main drawing. Need to tweak some parameters now, the points are all wrong ๐