A year or two ago, I actually had to force-restart my computer once or twice, when I did something to the effect of this: while (true) { } ...but I think some kind of watchdog or "nice" feature has been added to prevent this nowadays. The thing that ChucK does (I think) is hook onto the audio driver at a pretty low level, so if something goes wrong there (in my case I forgot to put a shred to sleep once in a while, giving the ChucK runtime no chance to go in and do stuff) chances are it will make the computer act sluggish. Again, this is no different from what any softsynth or VST host has to deal with, and I suspect that the safety measures in place practically cover all risks. /Stefan On Mon, Aug 2, 2010 at 6:46 PM, Edward Herbst wrote:

Thanks so much for the advice. best wishes, Ed

On Mon, Aug 2, 2010 at 12:20 PM, mike clemow wrote:

...

Edward,

I guess there's two things at play here. For starters, Ge Wang has a tendency to over-play the "disastrous crashes" of which Chuck is capable. He *is* being facetious. Chuck has not damaged anyone's computer, or ruined anyone's data to my knowledge. There is, however, as with all software released under the GNU Public License, no "guarantee" and downloading and running the software is technically "at your own risk," although I for one have never had any problems with Chuck or any GNU Public Licensed software that I would label "disastrous."

The worst Chuck has done for me is crashing it's own process and forcing me to restart it. It often does this when it should actually spit out some error message. It is also a tad more memory and CPU hungry than its developers would like it to be when it is "mature." I think that's what the real message is here.

Be not afraid. Chuck is good news.

Mike

On Sun, Aug 1, 2010 at 11:17 AM, Edward Herbst wrote:

...

Can someone please advise if someone is being facetious or is there really a risk in the download? When you click the Download link the first paragraph reads:

"ChucK-1.2.x.x is part of the Dracula release of ChucK - why Dracula? While the previous release (Frankenstein/1.1.x.x) offered the proof of concepts (timing, concurrency, on-the-fly programming) with a generous propensity to explode, the Dracula release is more refined and powerful with the addition of arrays, objects, events (and better explosions too). Additionally, the Dracula release is yet unoptimized and may suck all blood and life from your computer (anticipate spectacular crashes and other bloody disasters)... Please let us know if that happens. " - Show quoted text - _______________________________________________ chuck-users mailing list chuck-users@lists.cs.princeton.edu https://lists.cs.princeton.edu/mailman/listinfo/chuck-users

-- http://michaelclemow.com http://semiotech.org _______________________________________________ chuck-users mailing list chuck-users@lists.cs.princeton.edu https://lists.cs.princeton.edu/mailman/listinfo/chuck-users

_______________________________________________ chuck-users mailing list chuck-users@lists.cs.princeton.edu https://lists.cs.princeton.edu/mailman/listinfo/chuck-users

-- Release me, insect, or I will destroy the Cosmos!

Kas, True, true. Also, there's no accounting for taste, as they say. So, we can always add early 1990's techno to the list of possible adverse events. :) Mike 2010/8/3 Kassen :

Mike;

...

The worst Chuck has done for me is crashing it's own process and forcing me to restart it.

Other potential dangers include lost sleep, spending too much on exotic game controllers, angry neighbours, over consumption of caffeine, disturbed pets and complaining partners. We might need to append those to the list. ;-) Kas. _______________________________________________ chuck-users mailing list chuck-users@lists.cs.princeton.edu https://lists.cs.princeton.edu/mailman/listinfo/chuck-users

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