View Source Tools Release Notes

This document describes the changes made to the Tools application.

Tools 4.0

Fixed Bugs and Malfunctions

Dialyzer warnings due to type specs added in dbg have been eliminated.
Own Id: OTP-18860

In Erlang/OTP 26, doing a cover analysis on the line level would return multiple entries for lines on which multiple functions were defined.

For example, consider this module:

-module(foo).
-export([bar/0, baz/0]).

bar() -> ok. baz() -> not_ok.

In Erlang/OTP 26, analysing on the line level would return two entries for line 4:

1> cover:compile_module(foo).
{ok,foo}
2> foo:bar().
ok
3> cover:analyse(foo, coverage, line).
{ok,[{{foo,4},{1,0}},{{foo,4},{0,1}}]}
4> cover:analyse(foo, calls, line).
{ok,[{{foo,4},1},{{foo,4},0}]}

In Erlang/OTP 27, there will only be a single entry for line 4:

1> cover:compile_module(foo).
{ok,foo}
2> foo:bar().
ok
3> cover:analyse(foo, coverage, line).
{ok,[{{foo,4},{1,0}}]}
4> cover:analyse(foo, calls, line).
{ok,[{{foo,4},1}]}

Own Id: OTP-18998 Aux Id: GH-8159, PR-8182

Fixed align command in emacs mode.
Own Id: OTP-19026 Aux Id: PR-8155

Improvements and New Features

Triple-Quoted Strings has been implemented as per EEP 64. See String in the Reference Manual.
Example:
```
1> """
   a
   b
   c
   """.
"a\nb\nc"
```
Adjacent string literals without intervening white space is now a syntax error, to avoid possible confusion with triple-quoted strings. For example:
```
1> "abc""xyz".
"xyz".
* 1:6: adjacent string literals without intervening white space
```
POTENTIAL INCOMPATIBILITY
Own Id: OTP-18750 Aux Id: OTP-18746, PR-7313, PR-7451

There is a new tool tprof, which combines the functionality of eprof and cprof under one interface and adds heap profiling. It also has functionality to help with profiling process hierarchies.

Example:

1> tprof:profile(lists, seq, [1, 16], #{type => call_memory}).

****** Process <0.92.0>  --  100.00% of total *** 
FUNCTION          CALLS  WORDS  PER CALL  [     %]
lists:seq_loop/3      5     32      6.40  [100.00]
                            32            [ 100.0]
ok

Own Id: OTP-18756 Aux Id: PR-6639

Native coverage support has been implemented in the JIT. It will automatically be used by the cover tool to reduce the execution overhead when running cover-compiled code.
There are also new APIs to support native coverage without using the cover tool.
To instrument code for native coverage it must be compiled with the line_coverage option.
To enable native coverage in the runtime system, start it like so:
```
$ erl +JPcover true
```
There are also the following new functions for supporting native coverage:
Own Id: OTP-18856 Aux Id: PR-7856
The documentation has been migrated to use Markdown and ExDoc.
Own Id: OTP-18955 Aux Id: PR-8026
Improved the align command in emacs mode.
Own Id: OTP-19080 Aux Id: PR-8288

Tools 3.6

Improvements and New Features

Map comprehensions as suggested in EEP 58 has now been implemented.
Own Id: OTP-18413 Aux Id: EEP-58, PR-6727
The instrument module has been moved from tools to runtime_tools.
Own Id: OTP-18487 Aux Id: PR-6829

Tools 3.5.3

Improvements and New Features

Removed the previously undocumented and unsupported emem tool.
Own Id: OTP-17892 Aux Id: PR-5591

Tools 3.5.2

Fixed Bugs and Malfunctions

Erlang-mode fixed for newer versions of xref using CL-Lib structures instead of EIEIO classes.
Own Id: OTP-17746 Aux Id: GH-5314, PR-5324

Tools 3.5.1

Fixed Bugs and Malfunctions

The cover tool would not work on modules compiled with the tuple_calls option.
Own Id: OTP-17440 Aux Id: GH-4796

Tools 3.5

Fixed Bugs and Malfunctions

For cover-compiled code, the error behaviour of list and binary comprehensions that used andalso/orelse in guards could be changed so that a filter that was supposed be evaluated in guard context was evaluated in body context. That is, there was a possibility that comprehensions that did not raise exceptions could raise exceptions when being run using cover.
Own Id: OTP-17221 Aux Id: PR-4547

Improvements and New Features

Support for handling abstract code created before OTP R15 has been dropped.
Own Id: OTP-16678 Aux Id: PR-2627
Add types and specifications for documentation.
Own Id: OTP-16957
The experimental HiPE application has been removed, together with all related functionality in other applications.
* POTENTIAL INCOMPATIBILITY *
Own Id: OTP-16963

Tools 3.4.4

Fixed Bugs and Malfunctions

cover would crash when compiling a module having an exported function named clauses.
Own Id: OTP-17162 Aux Id: GH-4549, PR-2997, PR-4555, elixir-lang/elixir#10666
If beam_lib is asked to return abstract code for a BEAM file produced by Elixir and Elixir is not installed on the computer, beam_lib will no longer crash, but will return an error tuple. The cover:compile_beam() and cover:compile_beam_directory() functions have been updated to also return an error tuple in that situation.
Own Id: OTP-17194 Aux Id: GH-4353
Make emacs mode work on emacs-27.
Own Id: OTP-17225 Aux Id: PR-4542, GH-4451

Tools 3.4.3

Fixed Bugs and Malfunctions

Correct the Xref analysis undefined_functions to not report internally generated behaviour_info/1.
Own Id: OTP-17191 Aux Id: OTP-16922, ERL-1476, GH-4192

Tools 3.4.2

Fixed Bugs and Malfunctions

Correct the Xref analysis exports_not_used to not report internally generated behaviour_info/1.
Own Id: OTP-16922 Aux Id: PR-2752

Tools 3.4.1

Fixed Bugs and Malfunctions

Correct the Xref analysis locals_not_used to find functions called exclusively from on_load functions.
Own Id: OTP-16854 Aux Id: PR-2750

Tools 3.4

Improvements and New Features

Updates for new erlang:term_to_iovec() BIF.
Own Id: OTP-16128 Aux Id: OTP-15618
Improved the presentation of allocations and carriers in the instrument module.
Own Id: OTP-16327
Minor updates due to the new spawn improvements made.
Own Id: OTP-16368 Aux Id: OTP-15251

Tools 3.3.1.1

Fixed Bugs and Malfunctions

cover would crash when compiling a module having an exported function named clauses.
Own Id: OTP-17162 Aux Id: GH-4549, PR-2997, PR-4555, elixir-lang/elixir#10666

Tools 3.3.1

Fixed Bugs and Malfunctions

An Emacs warning due to lacking type in defcustom declaration has been fixed.
Own Id: OTP-16356
Improve emacs indentation.
Own Id: OTP-16472 Aux Id: ERL-1140
The cover tool could generate instrumented code for a module that would cause warnings to be issued.
Own Id: OTP-16476 Aux Id: ERL-1147
Fixed generated fprof analysis format to also handle data in maps.
Own Id: OTP-16498 Aux Id: ERL-814

Tools 3.3

Fixed Bugs and Malfunctions

Improve -spec indentation in emacs mode.
Own Id: OTP-16164

Improvements and New Features

The Emacs erlang-mode function that lets the user open the documentation for an Erlang/OTP function in an Emacs buffer has been improved. Bugs in this function has been fixed and and the user will now be asked if the man pages should be downloaded automatically by Emacs when they can't be found on the system. To test this functionality, put the cursor over the function name in a call to an Erlang/OTP function (e.g., "io:format("arg")") and type C-c C-d (i.e., Ctrl-key and c-key and then Ctrl-key and d-key). There is also a new menu item under the Erlang menu (labeled "Man - Function Under Cursor").
Own Id: OTP-16174

Tools 3.2.1

Fixed Bugs and Malfunctions

cover would fail to start if two processes tried to start it at the exact same time.
Own Id: OTP-15813 Aux Id: ERL-943

Tools 3.2

Fixed Bugs and Malfunctions

Add cprof and tags modules to .app file so that they are included in releases.
Own Id: OTP-15534 Aux Id: PR-2078
Improved documentation parsing in emacs erldoc functionality.
Own Id: OTP-15699 Aux Id: PR-2184

Improvements and New Features

The cover tool now uses the counters module instead of ets for updating the counters for how many times a line has been executed. By default, Cover will work with distributed nodes, but a new function cover:local_only/0 allows running the Cover in a restricted but faster local-only mode.
The increase in speed will vary depending on the type of code being cover-compiled, but as an example, the compiler test suite runs more than twice as fast with the new Cover.
Own Id: OTP-15575

Tools 3.1.0.1

Fixed Bugs and Malfunctions

cover would fail to start if two processes tried to start it at the exact same time.
Own Id: OTP-15813 Aux Id: ERL-943

Tools 3.1

Fixed Bugs and Malfunctions

Minor fixes for make clean.
Own Id: OTP-15657

Improvements and New Features

In the HTML file generated by cover:analyse_to_file/1,2, a link is now added to the line number. This makes it easier to share pointers to specific lines.
Own Id: OTP-15541
Uncovered lines are now marked with a sad face, :-(, in the HTML output from cover:analyse_to_file/1,2. This is to make these lines easier to find by search.
Own Id: OTP-15542

Tools 3.0.2

Improvements and New Features

Remove emacs warnings and added more tests.
Own Id: OTP-15476

Tools 3.0.1

Improvements and New Features

The HTML pages generated by cover:analyse_to_file/1 and related functions is improved for readability.
Own Id: OTP-15213 Aux Id: PR-1807
Add alignment functionality in emacs.
Own Id: OTP-15239 Aux Id: PR-1728

Tools 3.0

Improvements and New Features

Added instrument:allocations and instrument:carriers for retrieving information about memory utilization and fragmentation.
The old instrument interface has been removed, as have the related options +Mim and +Mis.
* POTENTIAL INCOMPATIBILITY *
Own Id: OTP-14961

Tools 2.11.2.2

Fixed Bugs and Malfunctions

cover would fail to start if two processes tried to start it at the exact same time.
Own Id: OTP-15813 Aux Id: ERL-943

Tools 2.11.2.1

Fixed Bugs and Malfunctions

Minor fixes for make clean.
Own Id: OTP-15657

Tools 2.11.2

Fixed Bugs and Malfunctions

A counting bug is corrected in Cover. The bug was introduced in Erlang/OTP 18.0.
Own Id: OTP-14817 Aux Id: PR 1641
The lcnt server will no longer crash if lcnt:information/0 is called before lcnt:collect/0.
Own Id: OTP-14912
lcnt:collect will now implicitly start the lcnt server, as per the documentation.
Own Id: OTP-14913

Improvements and New Features

Improved indentation in emacs and various other updates.
Own Id: OTP-14944

Tools 2.11.1

Fixed Bugs and Malfunctions

Removed all old unused files in the documentation.
Own Id: OTP-14475 Aux Id: ERL-409, PR-1493

Tools 2.11

Fixed Bugs and Malfunctions

The predefined Xref analysis locals_not_used no longer reports unused functions with the -on_load() attribute.
The new predefined Xref variable OL holds all functions with the -on_load() attribute.
Own Id: OTP-14344
In fprof when sampling multiple processes and analyzing with totals set to true, the output now sums together all caller and callee entries which concerns the same function. Previous behaviour was to report each contributing entry separately.
Own Id: OTP-14500

Improvements and New Features

Lock counting can now be fully toggled at runtime in the lock counting emulator (-emu_type lcnt). Everything is enabled by default to match the old behavior, but specific categories can be toggled at will with minimal runtime overhead when disabled. Refer to the documentation on lcnt:rt_mask/1 for details.
Own Id: OTP-13170
lcnt:collect and lcnt:clear will no longer block all other threads in the runtime system.
Own Id: OTP-14412
General Unicode improvements.
Own Id: OTP-14462
Tools are updated to show Unicode atoms correctly.
Own Id: OTP-14464
Add erlang:iolist_to_iovec/1, which converts an iolist() to an erlang:iovec(), which suitable for use with enif_inspect_iovec.
Own Id: OTP-14520

Tools 2.10.1

Fixed Bugs and Malfunctions

In OTP-20.0, the behavior of c, make, and ct_make was changed so that in some cases the beam files by default would be written to the directory where the source files were found. This is now changed back to the old behavior so beam files are by default written to current directory.
Own Id: OTP-14489 Aux Id: ERL-438

Tools 2.10

Fixed Bugs and Malfunctions

In some situations, make:all() and friends did not detect changes in include files located in the current directory. This is now corrected.
Own Id: OTP-14339 Aux Id: ERL-395

Improvements and New Features

The make module now accepts the {emake,Emake} option.
Own Id: OTP-14253
Miscellaneous updates due to atoms containing arbitrary Unicode characters.
Own Id: OTP-14285

Tools 2.9.1

Improvements and New Features

Improved edoc support in emacs mode.
Own Id: OTP-14217 Aux Id: PR-1282

Tools 2.9

Fixed Bugs and Malfunctions

Fix unhandled trace event send_to_non_existing_process in fprof.
Own Id: OTP-13998

Improvements and New Features

Improved edoc support in emacs erlang-mode.
Own Id: OTP-13945 Aux Id: PR-1157
Added erldoc to emacs mode which opens html documentation in browser from emacs. For example M-x erldoc-browse RET lists:foreach/2.
Own Id: OTP-14018 Aux Id: PR-1197

Tools 2.8.6

Fixed Bugs and Malfunctions

Errors in type specification and Emacs template generation for gen_statem:code_change/4 has been fixed from bugs.erlang.org's Jira cases ERL-172 and ERL-187.
Own Id: OTP-13746 Aux Id: ERL-172, ERL-187
Fix gc_start/gc_end in fprof tags when parsing old trace logs.
Own Id: OTP-13778 Aux Id: PR-1136
make (tools) and ct_make (common_test) would crash if an Erlang source file contained a -warning() directive.
Own Id: OTP-13855

Tools 2.8.5

Fixed Bugs and Malfunctions

Correct a bug when adding multiple modules to an Xref server. The bug was introduced in OTP-19.0.
Own Id: OTP-13708 Aux Id: ERL-173

Tools 2.8.4

Fixed Bugs and Malfunctions

Update fprof to use the new 'spawned' trace event to determine when a process has been created.
Own Id: OTP-13499

Improvements and New Features

Optimize adding multiple modules to an Xref server.
Own Id: OTP-13593
Various emacs mode improvements, such as better tags support.
Own Id: OTP-13610

Tools 2.8.3

Fixed Bugs and Malfunctions

cover:compile_beam/1 and cover:compile_beam_directory/1,2 crashed when trying to compile a beam file without a 'file' attribute. This has been corrected and an error is returned instead.
Thanks to Louis-Philippe Gauthier for reporting this bug.
Own Id: OTP-13200
Fix a bit string comprehension bug in Cover.
Own Id: OTP-13277 Aux Id: PR 856

Tools 2.8.2

Fixed Bugs and Malfunctions

The emacs mode does not add a newline after the arrow on -callback lines anymore.
Own Id: OTP-13042

Tools 2.8.1

Fixed Bugs and Malfunctions

If a module includes eunit.hrl, a parse transform adds the function test/0 on line 0 in the module. A bug in OTP-18.0 caused cover:analyse_to_file/1 to fail to insert cover data in the output file when line 0 existed in the cover data table. This is now corrected.
Own Id: OTP-12981

Tools 2.8

Fixed Bugs and Malfunctions

In order to improve performance of the cover tool, new functions are added for cover compilation and analysis on multiple files. This allows for more parallelisation.
Some improvements of the data base access is also done in order to improve the performance when analysing and resetting cover data.
Minor incompatibility: An error reason from analyse_to_file is changed from no_source_code_found to {no_source_code_found,Module}.
* POTENTIAL INCOMPATIBILITY *
Own Id: OTP-12330 Aux Id: seq12757
Attempting to do a cover analysis when neither source code nor beam file could be found would hang the cover server. Corrected to return a proper error.
Own Id: OTP-12806

Improvements and New Features

Allow maps for supervisor flags and child specs
Earlier, supervisor flags and child specs were given as tuples. While this is kept for backwards compatibility, it is now also allowed to give these parameters as maps, see sup_flags and child_spec.
Own Id: OTP-11043
Remove Mnemosyne rules support.
Own Id: OTP-12511
Add printout of total number of calls and time in eprof
Own Id: OTP-12681

Tools 2.7.2

Fixed Bugs and Malfunctions

Fix lcnt sorting and printout of histograms.
Own Id: OTP-12364
Fix a Unicode bug in the tags module.
Own Id: OTP-12567
Fix tags completion in erlang.el for GNU Emacs 23+
Own Id: OTP-12583

Tools 2.7.1

Fixed Bugs and Malfunctions

Fixed a typo in erlang-mode comment.
Own Id: OTP-12214
Add a skeleton for -spec in Erlang mode for Emacs
Own Id: OTP-12283

Improvements and New Features

Cover no longer crashes when compiling receive and the like with just an after clause. Thanks to José Valim for providing a fix.
Own Id: OTP-12328

Tools 2.7

Improvements and New Features

Add log2 histogram to lcnt for lock wait time
Own Id: OTP-12059

Tools 2.6.15

Fixed Bugs and Malfunctions

Removed erlang:bitstr_to_list/1 and erlang:list_to_bitstr/1. They were added by mistake, and have always raised an undefined exception when called.
Own Id: OTP-11942

Tools 2.6.14

Fixed Bugs and Malfunctions

Removed the support for the query keyword from emacs mode (Thanks to Paul Oliver)
Own Id: OTP-11568
Emacs mode improvements (Thanks to Steve Vinoski)
Own Id: OTP-11601
Application upgrade (appup) files are corrected for the following applications:
asn1, common_test, compiler, crypto, debugger, dialyzer, edoc, eldap, erl_docgen, et, eunit, gs, hipe, inets, observer, odbc, os_mon, otp_mibs, parsetools, percept, public_key, reltool, runtime_tools, ssh, syntax_tools, test_server, tools, typer, webtool, wx, xmerl
A new test utility for testing appup files is added to test_server. This is now used by most applications in OTP.
(Thanks to Tobias Schlager)
Own Id: OTP-11744
The emacs erlang mode now match erlang keywords more carefully (Thanks to Steve Vinoski)
Own Id: OTP-11786
The emacs erlang-mode now auto loads for more file types (Thanks to Phil Hagelberg)
Own Id: OTP-11788

Improvements and New Features

cover can run on itself. Also, support for reading BEAM files produced by ancient OTP versions before R9C has been removed.
Own Id: OTP-11692
Support maps in cover
Own Id: OTP-11764

Tools 2.6.13

Fixed Bugs and Malfunctions

Erlang-specific compilation error regexp is added in erlang-eunit.el. This defvar was earlier in erlang.el, but was erroneously removed in R15B02, while still used by erlang-eunit.el.
Own Id: OTP-11417 Aux Id: seq12447
Take compiler options from beam in cover:compile_beam. Thanks to Péter Gömöri.
Own Id: OTP-11439
Silence warnings (Thanks to Anthony Ramine)
Own Id: OTP-11517

Improvements and New Features

Add iodata, nonempty_string to built-in type highlighting for emacs. Thanks to Paul Oliver.
Own Id: OTP-11394

Tools 2.6.12

Improvements and New Features

Remove trailing spaces in Emacs templates. Thanks to Roberto Aloi.
Own Id: OTP-11198
Fixed the Emacs erlang-mode to accommodate the coding style where lists written across several lines have each line starting with a comma. Thanks to Magnus Henoch.
Own Id: OTP-11242
Make the Emacs Erlang mode TRAMP-aware when compiling. Thanks to Tomas Abrahamsson.
Own Id: OTP-11270

Tools 2.6.11

Fixed Bugs and Malfunctions

When cover:stop(Node) was called on a non-existing node, a process waiting for cover data from the node would hang forever. This has been corrected.
Own Id: OTP-10979

Improvements and New Features

Make cover smarter about finding source from beam.
In particular, search using the source path in module_info if the current heuristic fails.
Own Id: OTP-10902
Remove Flymake dependency in erlang-pkg.el. Thanks to Magnus Henoch.
Own Id: OTP-10930
Erlang-mode: Add autoload cookies for file extension associations. Thanks to Magnus Henoch.
Own Id: OTP-10999
Postscript files no longer needed for the generation of PDF files have been removed.
Own Id: OTP-11016
Fix a race condition when there're several applications in apps directory. Thanks to Manuel Rubio.
Own Id: OTP-11028
New option for eprof, 'set_on_spawn'. This option was previously always on and is also the default.
Own Id: OTP-11144

Tools 2.6.10

Improvements and New Features

Fix a bug in cover when used with no_auto_import. Thanks to José Valim.
Own Id: OTP-10778

Tools 2.6.9

Fixed Bugs and Malfunctions

Add missing modules in app-file
Own Id: OTP-10439
Make erlang-mode more compatible with package.el (Thanks to Gleb Peregud)
Own Id: OTP-10465
Fix various typos (thanks to Tuncer Ayaz)
Own Id: OTP-10611
Add separate face for exported functions (Thanks to Thomas Järvstrand)
Own Id: OTP-10637
The BIF highlighting in the emacs mode has been updated to correspond with the correct BIFs.
Own Id: OTP-10774

Improvements and New Features

Support for Unicode has been implemented.
Own Id: OTP-10302
A new function, cover:flush(Nodes), is added which will fetch data from remote nodes without stopping cover on those nodes. This is used by test_server and common_test when it is safe to assume that the node will be terminated after the test anyway. The purpose is to avoid processes crashing when re-loading the original beam if the processes is still running old code.
Remote nodes will now continue to count code coverage if the connection to the main node is broken. Earlier, a broken connection would cause the cover_server on the remote node to die and thus any still cover compiled modules would cause process crash when trying to insert cover data in ets tables that used to exist on the cover_server. The new functionality also involves synchronization with the main node if the nodes are reconnected.
* POTENTIAL INCOMPATIBILITY *
Own Id: OTP-10523 Aux Id: OTP-10427
Where necessary a comment stating encoding has been added to Erlang files. The comment is meant to be removed in Erlang/OTP R17B when UTF-8 becomes the default encoding.
Own Id: OTP-10630
Fix syntax highlighting of $\' in Emacs mode. Thanks to Magnus Henoch.
Own Id: OTP-10766

Tools 2.6.8

Fixed Bugs and Malfunctions

The last tuple fun call has been removed from fprof.
Own Id: OTP-10091 Aux Id: seq12067
Fix indentation of record fields in Emacs (Thanks to Tomas Abrahamsson)
Own Id: OTP-10120
Documentation fixes (Thanks to Ricardo Catalinas Jiménez )
Own Id: OTP-10121
Remove Erlang-specific compilation error regexp in erlang.el
Own Id: OTP-10168
Fix highlighting of atoms ending with a dollar sign
Like this: 'atom$'. In that example, the last single quote should be recognised as ending the atom. This needs a font-lock workaround similar to the one for strings. Thanks to Magnus Henoch
Own Id: OTP-10178
Xref now accepts filenames with character codes greater than 126. (Thanks to Emile Joubert for reporting the issue.)
Own Id: OTP-10192
Add test_indentation target to lib/tools/emacs/Makefile
Automatically indent test.erl.orig, save to test.erl, and compare to test.erl.intended. Thanks to Magnus Henoch.
Own Id: OTP-10226

Tools 2.6.7

Fixed Bugs and Malfunctions

Makefiles in erts, hipe and tools have been corrected to enable parallel make, i.e MAKEFLAGS=-jX where X is the parallelity number. As a result of this dependencies were corrected since that is what is needed for parallel make to work.
Own Id: OTP-9857 Aux Id: OTP-9451
Minor suppressions and fixes of compilation warnings
Own Id: OTP-10016

Tools 2.6.6.6

Fixed Bugs and Malfunctions

Update system profiling principles to reflect eprof performance improvements.
Own Id: OTP-9656
[cover] fix leftover {'DOWN', ..} msg in callers queue
After stopping cover with cover:stop() there could still be a {'DOWN',...} leftover message in the calling process's message queue. This unexpected leftover could be eliminated if erlang:demonitor/2 with option flush would be used in certain points
Own Id: OTP-9694
Add deps as erlang-flymake include directory.
Update erlang-flymake to recognize the "deps" folder as an include directory. This makes erlang-flymake compatible with the rebar dependency management tool's default folder structure, which puts included dependencies in "deps".(Thanks to Kevin Albrecht)
Own Id: OTP-9791

Improvements and New Features

Variables are now now allowed in 'fun M:F/A' as suggested by Richard O'Keefe in EEP-23.
The representation of 'fun M:F/A' in the abstract format has been changed in an incompatible way. Tools that directly read or manipulate the abstract format (such as parse transforms) may need to be updated. The compiler can handle both the new and the old format (i.e. extracting the abstract format from a pre-R15 BEAM file and compiling it using compile:forms/1,2 will work). The syntax_tools application can also handle both formats.
* POTENTIAL INCOMPATIBILITY *
Own Id: OTP-9643
Tuple funs (a two-element tuple with a module name and a function) are now officially deprecated and will be removed in R16. Use 'fun M:F/A' instead. To make you aware that your system uses tuple funs, the very first time a tuple fun is applied, a warning will be sent to the error logger.
Own Id: OTP-9649
Eliminate use of deprecated regexp module
Own Id: OTP-9810

Tools 2.6.6.5

Fixed Bugs and Malfunctions

Teach the emacs mode to compile yecc and leex files
If visiting a .yrl or .xrl file in emacs with erlang-mode, then the `erlang-compile' function (normally bound to C-c C-k), now knows how to compile yecc and leex files, and then, if that compilation succeeds, also compiles the resulting .erl files.
Also introduce a `erlang-compile-command-function-alist' to make it possible to hook in other functions for computing compilation commands/expressions, depending on file name. (Thanks to Tomas Abrahamsson )
Own Id: OTP-9503

Improvements and New Features

Bugs in xref(3) have been fixed. (Thanks to Matthias Lang.)
Own Id: OTP-9416

Tools 2.6.6.4

Fixed Bugs and Malfunctions

Change make:files to behave more like erlc
This change removes the unnecessary checks on the files when make:files is called and allows the error checking to be done in compile:file, where the error messages are produced. It does not affect the return value.
(Thanks to Sam bobroff)
Own Id: OTP-9179
add user specified compiler options on form reloading
In order to be able to test non-exported functions from another (test) module it is necessary to compile the specific module (at least during the test phase) with the exportall compiler option. This allows complete separation of testing and productive code. At the moment it is not possible to combine this with a test code coverage using the cover module. The problem is that when cover compiling a module using cover:compile* the code is reloaded into the emulator omitting/filtering the passed user options. In my example above the export_all option would be removed and the non-exported functions cannot be called any more. (Thanks to Tobias Schlager)
Own Id: OTP-9204
Inhibit electric newline after "->" when inside a type spec
The Erlang mode for Emacs inserts a newline after every "->", which saves you one keystroke when writing a function, but that is inappropriate when writing a type spec, as you'd normally keep the spec on one line. This change inhibits the automatic insertion when the current line starts with "-spec" or "-type".(Thanks to Magnus Henoch)
Own Id: OTP-9255
Add a check logic to prevent file descriptor leak
cover module handle files as raw in export and import. Assert counts of ports are the same at the beginning and at the end of the test case.(Thanks to Shunichi Shinohara)
Own Id: OTP-9300

Tools 2.6.6.3

Fixed Bugs and Malfunctions

Declare indentation options as "safe" in erlang-mode for Emacs
Emacs has a facility for setting options on a per-file basis based on comments in the source file. By default, all options are considered "unsafe", and the user is queried before the variable is set. This patch declares the variables erlang-indent-level, erlang-indent-guard and erlang-argument-indent to be safe, if the value specified in the source file is valid.
Such declarations usually look like this:
%% -- erlang-indent-level: 2 --
and appear on the first line of the file. (thanks to Magnus Henoch)
Own Id: OTP-9122

Improvements and New Features

Cover has been improved to take less memory and allow parallel analysis of cover data. Data collection from nodes is now done in parallel and it is now possible to issue multiple analyse and analyse_to_file requests at the same time. A new function call async_analyse_to_file has also been introduced, see the documentation for more details.
Own Id: OTP-9043 Aux Id: seq11771

Tools 2.6.6.2

Fixed Bugs and Malfunctions

eprof: API sort mismatch has now been fixed.
Own Id: OTP-8853
eprof: fix division by zero in statistics
Own Id: OTP-8963

Tools 2.6.6.1

Fixed Bugs and Malfunctions

cover will now show ampersand characters in the source code correctly. (Thanks to Tom Moertel.)
Own Id: OTP-8776

Tools 2.6.6

Fixed Bugs and Malfunctions

A race condition affecting Cover has been removed.
Own Id: OTP-8469
Emacs improvements:
Fixed emacs-mode installation problems.
Fixed a couple of -spec and -type indentation and font-lock problems.
Fixed error messages on emacs-21.
Magnus Henoch fixed several issues.
Ralf Doering, Klas Johansson and Chris Bernard contributed various emacs-eunit improvements.
Klas Johansson and Dave Peticolas added emacs-flymake support.
Own Id: OTP-8530

Improvements and New Features

Xref has been updated to use the re module instead of the deprecated regexp module.
* POTENTIAL INCOMPATIBILITY *
Own Id: OTP-8472
When given the option {builtins,true} Xref now adds calls to operators.
Own Id: OTP-8647
eprof has been reimplemented with support in the Erlang virtual machine and is now both faster (i.e. slows down the code being measured less) and scales much better. In measurements we saw speed-ups compared to the old eprof ranging from 6 times (for sequential code that only uses one scheduler/core) up to 84 times (for parallel code that uses 8 cores).
Note: The API for the eprof has been cleaned up and extended. See the documentation.
* POTENTIAL INCOMPATIBILITY *
Own Id: OTP-8706

Tools 2.6.5.1

Fixed Bugs and Malfunctions

A bug concerning bit comprehensions has been fixed in Cover. The bug was introduced in R13B03. (Thanks to Matthew Sackman.)
Own Id: OTP-8340

Improvements and New Features

Add lock profiling tool.
The Lock profiling tool, lcnt, can make use of the internal lock statistics when the runtime system is built with this feature enabled.
This provides a mechanism to examine potential lock bottlenecks within the runtime itself.
- Add erts_debug:lock_counters({copy_save, bool()}). This option enables or disables statistics saving for destroyed processes and ets-tables. Enabling this might consume a lot of memory.
- Add id-numbering for lock classes which is otherwise undefined.
Own Id: OTP-8424
emacs: Moved code skeletons to a separate file and and added a configurable variable to choose skeleton. Thanks Dave Peticolas.
Own Id: OTP-8446

Tools 2.6.5

Fixed Bugs and Malfunctions

The coverage analysis tool cover has been improved when it comes to handling list and bit string comprehensions (a counter for each qualifier), bit syntax expressions (the Value and Size expressions), and try expressions (the body called Exprs in the Reference Manual). A few (not all) situations where several expressions are put on the same line are also handled better than before.
Own Id: OTP-8188 Aux Id: seq11397
When loading Cover compiled code on remote nodes running code in the loaded module, a badarg failure was sometimes the result. This bug has been fixed.
Own Id: OTP-8270 Aux Id: seq11423
The short-circuit operators andalso and orelse are now handled correctly by the coverage analysis tool cover (it is no longer checked that the second argument returns a Boolean value.)
Own Id: OTP-8273

Tools 2.6.4

Fixed Bugs and Malfunctions

cover now properly escapes greater-than and less-than characters in comments in HTML reports. (Thanks to Magnus Henoch.)
Own Id: OTP-7939

Tools 2.6.3

Improvements and New Features

xref:start/1 does now allow anonymous XREF processes to be started
Own Id: OTP-7831

Tools 2.6.2

Fixed Bugs and Malfunctions

A bug in the Xref scanner has been fixed.
Own Id: OTP-7423
A bug in Fprof where the function 'undefined' appeared to call 'undefined' has been corrected.
Own Id: OTP-7509

Tools 2.6.1

Improvements and New Features

The documentation has been updated so as to reflect the last updates of the Erlang shell as well as the minor modifications of the control sequence p of the io_lib module.
Superfluous empty lines have been removed from code examples and from Erlang shell examples.
Own Id: OTP-6944 Aux Id: OTP-6554, OTP-6911
tuple_size/1 and byte_size/1 have been substituted for size/1.
Own Id: OTP-7009
The coverage analysis tool cover now handles the short-circuit Boolean expressions andalso/2 and orelse/2 properly.
Own Id: OTP-7095

Tools 2.6

Fixed Bugs and Malfunctions

The cover tool could use huge amounts of memory when used in a distributed system.
Own Id: OTP-6758

Tools 2.5.5

Fixed Bugs and Malfunctions

Missing buffer-local declaration in erlang.el has been added. Before this fix there could arise problems in other emacs modes after visiting a buffer using the erlang mode.
Own Id: OTP-6721
Key-map for 'backward-delete-char-untabif updated to work properly with Xemacs.
Own Id: OTP-6723

Improvements and New Features

Minor updates of Xref.
Own Id: OTP-6586
Minor Makefile changes.
Own Id: OTP-6689 Aux Id: OTP-6742
"C-u C-c C-k" now does a compile with both "debug_info" and "export_all".
Own Id: OTP-6741

Tools 2.5.4.1

Improvements and New Features

Changes due to internal interface changes in the erts application which are needed at compile-time. No functionality has been changed.
Own Id: OTP-6611 Aux Id: OTP-6580

Tools 2.5.4

Fixed Bugs and Malfunctions

Made change to support the function erlang-find-tag for xemacs and emacs-21.
Own Id: OTP-6512

Improvements and New Features

Minor updates of xref for future compatibility.
Own Id: OTP-6513

Tools 2.5.3

Fixed Bugs and Malfunctions

eprof did not work reliably in the SMP emulator, because the trace receiver process could not process the trace messages fast enough. Therefore, eprof now blocks the other schedulers while profiling.
Own Id: OTP-6373

Tools 2.5.2

Fixed Bugs and Malfunctions

Fprof traces could become truncated for the SMP emulator. This bug has now been corrected.
Own Id: OTP-6246

Tools 2.5.1

Fixed Bugs and Malfunctions

eprof now works somewhat better in the SMP emulator.
Own Id: OTP-6152

Tools 2.5

Fixed Bugs and Malfunctions

Fixed some bugs in make:
make:files/1,2 can now handle a file in another directory as argument, similar to make:all/0,1.
When specifying a file name including the .erl extension in Emakefile, make:all/0,1 looked for the object code in the wrong place.
When specifying a file name including the .erl extension in Emakefile and some compile options for the file, make:files/0,1 did not use the options as it should do.
Own Id: OTP-6057 Aux Id: seq10299
cover: When cover:stop() was called, the cover compiled code was not unloaded (as stated in the documentation) but simply marked as 'old'. This meant that processes lingering in (or with funs referencing to) the cover compiled code would survive even when the cover server and its ETS tables was terminated.
Now the cover compiled code is unloaded, meaning that processes lingering in/with references to it will be killed when cover:stop is called, instead of later crashing with badarg when trying to bump counters in ETS tables no longer existing.

Improvements and New Features

Replaced call to deprecated function file:file_info/1 with call to filelib:is_dir/1 and filelib:is_regular/1 in tags.erl.
Own Id: OTP-6079

Tools 2.4.7

Fixed Bugs and Malfunctions

A bug in fprof profiling causing erroneous inconsistent trace failure has been corrected.
Own Id: OTP-5922 Aux Id: seq10203

Tools 2.4.6

Fixed Bugs and Malfunctions

Emacs: erlang-man-function and erlang-man-module used a pattern matching to find the requested module that sometimes yielded unexpected results. For example, erlang-man-module file would display the man page for CosFileTransfer_File.
Own Id: OTP-5746 Aux Id: seq10096
Some compiler warnings and Dialyzer warnings were eliminated in the Tools application.
When tracing to a port (which fprof does), there could be fake schedule out/schedule in messages sent for a process that had exited.
Own Id: OTP-5757

Tools 2.4.5

Fixed Bugs and Malfunctions

The cross reference tool xref did not handle the new fun M:F/A construct properly. This problem has been fixed.
Own Id: OTP-5653

Tools 2.4.4

Fixed Bugs and Malfunctions

The cover tool did not escape '<' and '>' not being part of HTML tags in HTML log files.
Own Id: OTP-5588

Tools 2.4.3

Improvements and New Features

It is now possible to encrypt the debug information in beam files, to help keep the source code secret. See compile for how to provide the key for encrypting, and beam_lib for how to provide the key for decryption so that tools such as Debugger, xref, or cover can be used.
The beam_lib:chunks/2 functions now accepts an additional chunk type 'compile_info' to retrieve the compilation information directly as a term. (Thanks to Tobias Lindahl.)
Own Id: OTP-5460 Aux Id: seq9787

Tools 2.4.2

Fixed Bugs and Malfunctions

The cover tool could not analyze empty modules on module level.
Own Id: OTP-5418

Tools 2.4.1

Fixed Bugs and Malfunctions

The xref analysis locals_not_used could return too many functions. This problem has been fixed.
Own Id: OTP-5071
The cover tool could not always compile parse transformed modules. This problem has been fixed.
Own Id: OTP-5305

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