Flutter DevTools 2.4.0 Release Notes

[Jacob Richman]

Flutter DevTools 2.4.0 Release Notes

Flutter DevTools - A Suite of Performance Tools for Dart and Flutter

General Updates

• Improve crash reporting #3100

• Improve scrolling and zooming behavior for flame charts in the Performance and CPU Profiler pages #3107   

• Fix bug where you could trigger simultaneous app connections #3114 

• Update web app Favicon to be consistent with other Dart products #3119 

• Add support for forking features based on pre-release versions of Flutter #3134 

• Make warning and error banners more compact #3159 

• Perform more normalization of the input VM service URI to handle the service URL printed by Flutter Tools #3160 

Inspector Updates

• Add a dense mode for the Flutter Inspector. This will be enabled by default when using the embedded DevTools inspector in an IDE, and can optionally be enabled when using DevTools in the browser. #3149 

• Polish UI #3108 

• Fix NPE #3116 

Performance Updates

• Added features for diagnosing shader compilation jank. When a Flutter frame janks due to compiling shaders, that will be called out in the Flutter frames chart. You can read about how to pre-cache shaders to eliminate this jank here. This documentation is also linked in the warning that will appear at the top of DevTools when shader compilation jank is detected. To use this feature, you’ll need to be on the latest version of Flutter (master channel). When running your Flutter app, make sure you run with the --purge-persistent-cache flag to ensure you can reproduce the shader compilation jank. This will clear the cache to ensure you are reproducing the problem users will see for the "first run" or "re-open" (iOS) experience.

• Cache CPU profiles for selected timeline events so that data does not fall out of the CPU sample buffer once you have already loaded a profile #3121 

• Show an event summary view for events on the UI thread. Until this change, only the CPU profiler was displayed for UI thread events, but now both the CPU profiler and summary view are available for these events.  We already show this information for events that are not on the UI thread.

CPU Profiler Updates

• Disable CPU profiler controls while a recording is in progress to avoid bad state issues #3127 

• Fix NPEs #3142 

Debugger Updates

• Prevent operators from showing up in eval autocomplete #3091

• Polish debugger UI #3088, #3093, #3104

App Size Tool Updates

• Improve messaging when data is loading #3109 

Changelog

More details about changes and fixes are available in our changelog.