[chuck-users] ChucK and Processing

[Kassen]

On 9/5/07, Arthur Clemens <arthur at visiblearea.com> wrote:
>
> >
> > Ok, so the issue is that ChucK keeps running when Processing is
> > killed? If that's a real problem you could try to make ChucK poll
> > processing over OSC every second or so and if it isn't running
> > ChucK could send a system command to kill ChucK.
>
> How would this work? Unfortunately there is no command 'Machine.kill
> ()'. 'Machine.crash()' is not so neat.


The easiest and safest way is probably to use the standard library function
that issues a call to the OS and have the OS execute "chuck --kill". The
advantage of this is that it will also work in the case the VM is set to
--loop.

This would elimiate the need for the sugestion below since you could have
Processing ask ChucK to terminate directly (or more precicely; have
Processing ask ChucK to ask the OS to terminate ChucK).

That being said; now that I think about it I have no idea why there is no
Machine.kill() command. Considdering that defining public classes will make
changes to the VM that can't be undone from within ChucK it would seem
ballanced to be able to destroy the VM from within ChucK without crashing.



Also, I cannot use 'OscEvent oeAlive => now;' because that will wait
> for the message that will not arive anymore...



Yes. True. A clean solution would be to have your OSC parsing function
write "now" to a variable of type "time" named
"last_time_we_heard_from_processing" (or the like) every time a OSC event
comes in. Then you could have a function that would periodically substract
this from "now" and if the outcome is longer then -say- ten seconds this
shred would call for the destruction of the VM. The exact tuning of this
might need some care because obviously we wouldn't want to accidentally
destroy the VM (and we don't want to wait more then we have to) but as a
general principle this seems like a good plan to me and it also deals with
the chance that processing would crash/get stuck. You might want to check
/examples/time/ for details on how variables of the type "time" work.

Disclaimer; these sound like good plans to me but I don't think I ever
actually tried either. May catch fire, no waranties, no refunds.

Hope that helps,
Kas.
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