Qt Creator Tips for WebKit GTK

Introduction

Using an IDE on GNU/Linux for C/C++ development is slightly contentious in many circles. People either seem to not find IDE’s value-add worthwhile compared to their cult text editor + UNIX tools, or have tried them in the past and not had good experiences, so soilder on with the cult text editor approach. I’ve tended to be in the latter camp of people, knowing that in a perfect world an IDE would help me, but they don’t seem to be up-to-snuff in this environment yet.

I’d limped along with taggers like GNU global and etags alongside Emacs. Cortored find+grep commands wired into Emacs’ helm package were my “Find all references” and “Jump to definition”. It worked to an extent, but it does feel a little primitive, and GUD always frustrated me. New semantic taggers such as SourceWeb and rtags looked interesting and hope they continue to mature, but I was struggling getting WebKit through them. The Clang tooling is also rather slow at processing the source files, upon which both these tools are based.

You can make Qt Creator build and install WebKit into a jhbuild for, say, Epiphany. I describe those steps if you’re inclined have that full IDE experience. The instructions below are annotated with [Building?] for steps that are applicable only to that configuration. I don’t personally do this because I prefer to run the build/install commands outside the IDE. With those introductions out of the way, what I’ve ended up with is a decent code navigator (alternative to Eclipse!) and a good debugger frontend. I’m happier with the combination of cult editor + Qt Creator for working on C++ projects. It’s not perfect, but I hope you might find it useful as well.

First get Qt Creator installed. If using your distributions package manager, just check the version is fairly recent. If it isn’t, download if from the Qt Creator site, but during the installation process, I recommend not installing the Qt libraries.

Load the project into Qt Creator

  • Always run Qt Creator from the WebKit jhbuild environment. E.g., ./Tools/jhbuild/jhbuild-wrapper --gtk run /usr/bin/qtcreator. If you don’t, CMake will find all kinds of random junk it calls dependencies on your system, if you’re lucky.
  • Go to File > Open File or Project.
  • Navigate to the top-level CMakeLists.txt in the WebKit checkout.
  • In the Configure Project screen, change the build directory output to taste. If you’re not planning on building from IDE, this doesn’t matter.
  • [Building?] For build directories, you could put it in $WEBKIT_ROOT/WebKitBuild/{Release,Debug} to match WebKit conventions. Don’t bother with the other configurations, especially not RelWithDebInfo, there are problems in WebKit with this configuration. Now click on Manage in the Desktop kit page (it’s one of those buttons that magically appears on the screen when you hover over it…), scroll down to CMake Configuration and click Change. Remove the Qt install prefix definitions, and add CMAKE_INSTALL_PREFIX:INTERNAL=/path/to/jhbuild/install/ and CMAKE_INSTALL_LIBDIR:INTERNAL=lib. Note carefully that shell variables are not expanded here, so don’t use something like $HOME. You can also change the compiler and debugger used by the kit as well. Also make sure Qt version is None.
  • Once you get into the IDE after these steps, CMake will fail because we haven’t specified a port.
  • From the mode selector, click Projects (thing with the wrench icon) and go to the build settings. Set PORT=GTK and also add a boolean property for DEVELOPER_MODE=ON and ENABLE_WAYLAND_TARGET=OFF if you’re working on X11.
  • [Building?] Click Advanced if you’d like to change the default compiler switches for Debug/Release configurations. With GCC I like to use -ggdb -Og in Debug.
  • Configuring should now suceed
  • [Building?] Click Build and it will likely fail. I’ve found Qt Creator needs to be restarted at this point. Restart and the build should now work.
  • [Building?] As a finishing touch, you can configure the run configuration for launching Epiphany. In the Run Settings window under the projects mode, create a custom deploy step to run command jhbuild with arguments run cmake -P cmake_install.cmake. This will install WebKit in the jhbuild environment. Now add a custom executable and specify the executable to be jhbuild and the arguments to be run epiphany. The Run button will now install WebKit for use by Epiphany and launch the browser ready for attachment (see next section).

Debugging

  • Due to the multi-process nature of WebKit, you can’t just click on “Start Debugging”, since there’s several processes you might want to attach to. Launch WebKit and once it’s running, go to Debug > Start Debugging > Attach to Running Application and select the PID of the process you’d like to attach to.
  • It’s likely Qt Creator will time out the GDB launch and ask if you’d like to give it more time. Say yes, and go to Tools > Options > Debugger > GDB and bump the timeout up to 60 seconds.
  • If you’re getting assembly instructions when you hit a breakpoint, it’s likely your source isn’t getting found with the debugger. This shouldn’t happen to you, but if it does you’ll want to add ../../Source -> $WEBKIT_CHECKOUT/Source source mapping. This can be done in Tools > Options > Debugger > General. The build system doesn’t force
    the compiler to emit absolute paths in debugging info (there are ways around that, but this is easier)
  • GDB commands can be issued by bringing up the poorly named “Debugger Log” in the debugger views menu. Some helpful commands I’ve used on WebKit are handle SIGUSR1 noprint to stop being interrupted by IPC, and set scheduler-locking on to single-step through the current thread (you really don’t want to enable that from the start though 😉 just use it in the middle of debug session when you want to step a thread).
  • Everything else I’ve found convenient to do via the IDE.

Issues

  • Header files don’t have their #if parsed properly, I think because the config.h is indirectly available to header files, which is really unfriendly to static analysis tools used by IDEs. This is with the default code model, I’m sure it would be better if you try the Clang code model, but the current support for that in Qt Creator is limited, and the tradeoff is much, much slower indexing. This isn’t really an issue with the IDE but rather the coding style guidelines of WebKit.
  • Switching kits often requires restarting the IDE, otherwise you get build step errors. I’m guessing this has something to do with the CMake caching the IDE uses. When in doubt, restart the IDE.
  • When you do an expensive interaction with the code model, it blocks the UI thread rendering the whole IDE unresponsive. This is much worse with the Clang code model because it’s so much slower than the default. Can be a problem with the Qt Code Model if you ask for things like the type hierachy.