Symbol Caches

OK, here I am back from a blogging sabbatical (summer in Seattle is so precious that it is sacrilegious not to spend it outside).

And the past few months have been quite eventful. I thought that everything out here in the blogosphere was going to be overshadowed by Real Life (kind of like Michael Phelps steeling the center stage away from Liam Tancock, a guy with a lot of bronze under his belt). Watching the news was a bit of a distraction I must admit...

But I spent the few rainy summer nights working on a ZeroBUGS new exciting feature: caching symbol tables and other debug information from one session to another.

This allows the debugger to start up faster, and use lesser memory (since the cached info is already indexed on disk, there is no need to build maps and hashes in memory).

I have deprecated an older implementation for caching symbol tables, that was based on memory-mapped files. The new code is built upon SQLite, and ensures data integrity with triggers that enforce foreign key constraints.

For the sake of stability, the commercial release does not feature the SQLite-based caches yet. The plan is to slowly burn in the new code through the beta builds, and have it officially released later this fall.