Hi D.Bane!
I'm glad you like Ecere and I will also be happy if you can contribute
I'm quite picky about how things should work and get fixed hehe
But the best way to go about it is you choose one of the issues which you would like to work on, you can let me know about it and I can give you some additional info or suggest a particular way. Also you should make your own fork of the Ecere SDK on
github, and when you have a fix or contribution you can commit it there in your own fork of Ecere, then let me know about it (You could issue a 'Pull Request'), and I will look at what you did and see if there's anything I want to improve, and when it's ready I will integrate it into the master branch of Ecere! I'm assuming you're already familiar with git, right? You've been using it to get the the latest code?
As for profiling, to be honest I don't use gprof much. I've tried to use it before on Windows but it's quirky at best (some versions of gcc and/or gprof didn't work at all though, you have to use the right one to get proper results), it would probably work better on Ubuntu. However, I don't think a profiler is useful to solve any of the current issues on Mantis. I don't think there are many performance issues on Mantis, and those that may be there I already have an idea how to solve them, e.g. the compiler performance which I hope I will work on soon.
As for MemoryGuard, it is a very useful tool, e.g. to solve memory corruption issues when things are getting wacky and you don't know what the heck is going on, or for finding memory leaks. To get the output in Windows, you'll have to select 'Console Application' in the Project Settings/Linking Tab, and the output will show up in the application's console. On Linux, it shows in the 'Debug' tab of the IDE. I'm not sure if you're familiar with running application with MemoryGuard on Linux already... But what we do is we add ecere.epj to the workspace of the application being debugged (e.g. ide.epj), and make the "memoryguard' config active for both of them (use space on the topnode of the the project view to toggle the current config). The MemoryGuard-enabled library will automatically be on when running this way (there is no need to copy the ecere.dll file around).
Looking forward to your contributions!
All the best,
Jerome