Efficient workflow/tooling for working on CEF+Chromium

[ralfwk]

Hi,

I recently started coding on a prototype for a project based on CEF and Chromium that requires extending Blink internally. So far I got the first results and wanted to say thank you for providing CEF and esp. for the up-to-date MasterBuildQuickStart documentation on how to setup the build.

I was wondering if there is a trick to speed up development cycles when working on Chromium internals. Doing a 'ninja cefclient' build or building a test suite after making a change takes about 6,5 minutes for me on a 2,5GHz i7, most time seems to be spend in linking the framework. Is there some way to test changes quicker or is that how it's done generally?

I also wondered about effectively working with such a large project. I am not coding C++ in my day-to-day work, so I wondered what is a good setup to navigate and code in such a huge project. I am looking for basic things like Jump to definition, Searching, Code completion and maybe debugger support. I tried CLion which needed minutes to index the source tree; I browsed a bit around in the Chromium documentation and found a reference to SlickEdit (https://www.chromium.org/developers/sli ... itor-notes), which I tried and which provides really fast navigation&search over the source code. I am working on OS X, but could setup a Linux or Windows environment for this project as well. Any recommendations for working with the code base effectively?

Thanks for any advice,

Greetings,

Ralf

[magreenblatt]

Visual Studio on Windows is the best that I've found so far for navigating the code while editing and debugging. For searching the Chromium code I highly recommend the online tool: https://cs.chromium.org/. For smaller changes I just open individual files in whatever syntax highlighting editor is most convenient (Notepad++, Xcode, gedit, etc.). It's also possible to configure Vim, Emacs or Eclipse to work with Chromium code if you're already familiar with one of those editors.