parasite-smiling

One thing we’ve run into at VMware is that devel­op­ing GTK+ appli­ca­tions can be hard. Espe­cially when cre­at­ing and edit­ing UI ele­ments from code (as opposed to Glade), it’s some­times chal­leng­ing to debug prob­lems. If a but­ton isn’t show­ing up the right size, or some­thing is aligned incor­rectly, it could be any num­ber of problems.

In order to address this, we’ve started devel­op­ment on a new debug­ging tool, which we’re call­ing Par­a­site. The name comes from the fact that it runs in-process with another appli­ca­tion (specif­i­cally, as a GTK+ mod­ule) and infests it with intro­spec­tion capabilities.

There’s a lot that can be said about what it does, but the best place to start is prob­a­bly a screencast.

parasite-introThere’s a lot more infor­ma­tion, some screen­shots, and instruc­tions for get­ting the source at http://chipx86.github.com/gtkparasite/