Tag Archives: lldb

Things I’ve Learned This Week (May 4 – May 8, 2015)

How to convert an NSString to a Gecko nsAString

I actually discovered this during my most recent Joy of Coding episode – there is a static utility method to convert between native Cocoa NSStrings and Gecko nsAStrings – nsCocoaUtils::GetStringForNSString. Very handy, and works exactly as advertised.

An “Attach to Process by pid” Keyboard Shortcut for XCode

I actually have colleague Garvan Keeley to thank for this one, and technically I learned this on April 24th. It was only this week that I remembered I had learned it!

When I’m debugging Firefox on OS X, I tend to use XCode, and I usually attach to Firefox after it has started running. I have to navigate some menus in order to bring up the dialog to attach to a process by pid, and I was getting tired of doing that over and over again.

So, as usual, I tweeted my frustration:

AND LO, THE INTERNET SPOKE BACK:

It seems small, but the savings in time for something that I do so frequently quickly adds up. And it always feels good to go faster!

Things I’ve Learned This Week (March 30 – April 3, 2015)

This is my second post in a weekly series, where I attempt to distill my week down into some lessons or facts that I’ve picked up. Let’s get to it!

ES6 – what’s safe to use in browser development?

As of March 27, 2015, ES6 classes are still not yet safe for use in production browser code. There’s code to support them in Firefox, but they’re Nightly-only behind a build-time pref.

Array.prototype.includes and ArrayBuffer.transfer are also Nightly only at this time.

However, any of the rest of the ES6 Harmony work currently implemented by Nightly is fair-game for use, according to jorendorff. The JS team is also working on a Wiki page to tell us Firefox developers what ES6 stuff is safe for use and what is not.

Getting a profile from a hung process

Update [January 23rd, 2017]: Markus Stange contacted me to let me know that the function mozilla_sampler_save_profile_to_file has been changed to profiler_save_profile_to_file. This happened in this bug. I’ve updated the post to reflect this.

According to mstange, it is possible to get profiles from hung Firefox processes using lldb1.

  1. After the process has hung, attach lldb.
  2. Type in2, :
    p (void)profiler_save_profile_to_file("somepath/profile.txt")
  3. Clone mstange’s handy profile analysis repository.
  4. Run:
    python symbolicate_profile.py somepath/profile.txt

    To graft symbols into the profile. mstange’s scripts do some fairly clever things to get those symbols – if your Firefox was built by Mozilla, then it will retrieve the symbols from the Mozilla symbol server. If you built Firefox yourself, it will attempt to use some cleverness3 to grab the symbols from your binary.

    Your profile will now, hopefully, be updated with symbols.

    Then, load up Cleopatra, and upload the profile.

    I haven’t yet had the opportunity to try this, but I hope to next week. I’d be eager to hear people’s experience giving this a go – it might be a great tool in determining what’s going on in Firefox when it’s hung4!

Parameter vs. Argument

I noticed that when I talked about “things that I passed to functions5”, I would use “arguments” and “parameters” interchangeably. I recently learned that there is more to those terms than I had originally thought.

According to this MSDN article, an argument is what is passed in to a function by a caller. To the function, it has received parameters. It’s like two sides of a coin. Or, as the article puts it, like cars and parking spaces:

You can think of the parameter as a parking space and the argument as an automobile. Just as different automobiles can park in a parking space at different times, the calling code can pass a different argument to the same parameter every time that it calls the procedure.6

Not that it really makes much difference, but I like knowing the details.


  1. Unfortunately, this technique will not work for Windows. 🙁  

  2. Assuming you’re running a build after this revision landed. 

  3. A binary called dump_syms_mac in mstange’s toolkit, and nm on Linux 

  4. I’m particularly interested in knowing if we can get Javascript stacks via this technique – I can see that being particularly useful with hung content processes. 

  5. Or methods. 

  6. Source