[chuck-users] a little debugging help for frozen VM!

Kassen signal.automatique at gmail.com
Sat May 26 08:55:34 EDT 2012


On Sat, May 26, 2012 at 01:12:07PM +0100, Scott Hewitt wrote:
> hi,
> 
> No I dont think you missed anything just saying that it would be
> useful if zero time loops could be intercepted before they are run so
> as to protect the VM

Got it.

I think there are some issues with this though. "Zero time" loops can
be useful. For example; I might be playing back a wave-file and at
some point desire to know when the next zero crossing in it is. For
that I'd use a loop and this loop wouldn't advance time and would run 
until either the next such point or at worst the end of the wave-file.
In this case you and I know that the loop will terminate but ChucK
doesn't. Those two types of loops are non-trivial to sort; it would
need to happen in the parser yet also take the state of the VM into
account; anything that uses me.yield() may be safe, but only if there
is at least one other shred running, for example.

We do have the popup in the Mini and I think that "watchdog"
functionality is also there in the CLI version but it could be made
more accessible there, for example by printing a message when a halted
VM is suspected. That's quite close to what you propose in practice, I
think, and workable.

Imho parser/compilation errors leading to segfaults are a bigger
danger to the VM but my perception might be slanted by my own use
patterns.

As a final point; the worst loss of the VM is in the Mini where a loss
of the VM typically also means a loss of the contents of unsaved
buffers. There auto-saving buffers to a special directory would
decrease the risks by decreasing the consequences. To me those two
solutions seem like a decent remedy for some of the risks that
powertools like detailed control over execution create. ChucK is
probably not the right tool for high-security or high-risk
applications and a bit of risk does add some excitement ;-).

IMHO, IMHO and IMHO, respectively. Trying to solve the halting problem
is primarily like designing a perpetuum mobile; great fun.

Kas.


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