Develop instabilities

[Lindon]

Sigh, I - as you may have seen - have been trying to get my large project to work - whilst trying to get develop to compile with IPP.

Recently Dave Healey had a run at this and sent me a "working" version - that is now crashing badly (again) like this on project load:

So I'm opening this new thread with the hope of documenting whats happening (at the very least)..so expect more posts from me here....

[d.healey]

@lindon You're not alone - https://forum.hise.audio/topic/5203/how-do-i-debug-project-crashes

[Lindon]

Okay a fair bit of progress....I can make HISE Develop crash absolutely repeatably....with what I think is a segmentation error, (malloc failing) - but dont trust the non-C++ programmer... - I'm currently on the Mac but I think this is true on Windows too....

The change I make is to add a single line of code, any line of code....

It's a big project with a lot of components....theres a bunch of samples and synths (for a total of 7 "voices") and each of these inside a synthesiser container and each of them has a number of Script Processors.

In each "voice" theres a script called mono (well mono1, mono2, mono3, mono4 etc.)

I added each of these in turn and mono3 started to crash HISE Develop when I loaded the project - ocassionaly the Mac offers me a dump report with the malloc error in it...

So I emptied mono3 (removing all the code) and slowly added it back in. When I put this (and only this) in the init section of mono3

var lastNote;

HISE develop will load and run.

but if I say this:

var lastNote;
var myVal;

It really doesn't matter what this variable is (or a reg variable ) HISE will crash on loading the project

take out the second variable and it will load and run again

@Christoph-Hart - this looks way above my pay grade - I can wrap up the project and send it to you.

[d.healey]

@lindon Try splitting your code into separate files, each with their own namespace, and avoid using var wherever possible, especially in on init as these pollute the script-wide namespace. I don't know if this will solve the problem but it will make it easier to navigate your code and "bypass" sections for testing.

[ustk]

@lindon said in Develop instabilities:

It really doesn't matter what this variable is

Do you mean name wise too or always with that myVal name?
Because it reminds me of an old issue I had where some namings aren't "allowed" because they are competing against the source. But it might not be the case here...

[ustk]

@d-healey said in Develop instabilities:

avoid using var wherever possible, especially in on init as these pollute the script-wide namespace

What do you want to use instead? A reg pollutes the same way, right?

[d.healey]

@ustk No reg doesn't pollute the script-wide namespace.

namespace test
{
	var myVar = 10;
	reg myReg = 50;
}

Console.print(myVar);
Console.print(myReg);

Somebody documentented this stuff and nobody reads it - https://docs.hise.audio/scripting/scripting-in-hise/hise-script-coding-standards.html

[Lindon]

@d-healey - these were reg to start with so that's not it, and @ustk ANY name myVar thisVar, myThis, SOmething, Anything

[ustk]

@d-healey Oh gosh I never ever noticed that! But I generally use var only in functions that are not inline

[d.healey]

@lindon said in Develop instabilities:

these were reg to start with so that's not it

How many did you have? The limit is 32 per namespace. But I don't think this is the issue. I was just suggesting you use namespaces and separate files to make your code more manageable.

[Lindon]

OKay - confirmed - exactly the same behaviour on Windows as MacOS.

[Lindon]

@d-healey - so tell me this about namespaces -

I have (say) a Script processor with code in init, onNoteOn and onNoteOff

where am I putting this namespace ? in the Init? Does that work? Will I need to prepend the namespace name in onNoteOn and onNoteOff?

[d.healey]

@lindon said in Develop instabilities:

so tell me this about namespaces

Here's what I wrote about namespaces in the doc I posted above

• There is no performance penalty for using namespaces.
• Namespaces should be written in Pascal case .
• If the namespace resides in a dedicated external file the file should have the same name as the namespace, e.g. PageHandler.js .
• Namespaces cannot be nested.
• Don't declare var variables inside a namespace. Use reg instead.
• Each namespace can have up to 32 reg variables

A namespace is a bit like a singleton class.

Here's a screenshot of the on init section from a largish project I'm working on. Every single one of those include lines you see refers to a separate file. So all my LAF code (and some related paint routines and theming stuff) goes inside my LookAndFeel.js.

Everything related to presets and the preset browser goes inside Presets.js.

It makes it really easy to organise the code, and when you're debugging you can comment out a whole file's worth of code just by commenting out the include line.

All the other default callbacks are unaffected but you can call code from your external files in those callbacks.

So if you had a namespace for handling keyswitches; in the on note on callback you could call something like Keyswitches.changeArticulation().

[Lindon]

@d-healey - well thats pretty much how I use them... maybe not as well or as often but really I'm asking about whats not in the documentation:

having a name space declared in the on init section of a script processor...

namspace myThing
{
    reg myVar;
}

means in the onNoteOn callback I have to say this:

Console.print(myThing.myVar);

Correct?

[ustk]

@lindon exact

[Lindon]

@ustk @d-healey well I've created a whole swag of namespaces, and its still crashing....its just massively unreliable at large project scales...

[Lindon]

@lindon - and when it does run it runs like a dog...its incredibly slow - and yes this is NOT the debug HISE...

[d.healey]

@lindon said in Develop instabilities:

and when it does run it runs like a dog

Was this the same in the master branch?

[Lindon]

@d-healey nope master runs OK.