Re: wish list

On May 4, 2004, at 4:41 PM, Rick Giuly wrote:

> 1. Way to exit breve with no extra messages, no destroying objects, 
> just
> exit.
> I decided to save population to disk, exit breve, and reload it for 
> each
> evaluation, mainly to force garbage collection. With the command line 
> only
> version, each time I exit by calling "die", I get a huge number of 
> warnings
> about freeing objects that are already free, it actually takes longer 
> to
> print out all the warnings than to do the evaluation. (There is also 
> some
> high CPU activity going on during the exit though I'm not sure what 
> it's
> doing.)

The new version will include an "end-simulation" method to elegantly 
stop
a simulation (in contrast to "die"), but it still will free the 
allocated
objects.

If the problem is just the warnings, I can supply a way to suppress 
them.
If you send me your code, I can also have a look at the CPU usage when
the simulation terminates.

As a quick hack, though, you might way to use "kill -9" or its Windows
equivalent to stop the process in its tracks.

> 2. Way to trap error reading an object file. XML files get corrupted 
> for
> random reasons during many-hour evaluations. I need a way to detect 
> and deal
> with the problem automatically.

Can you clarify when the problem is happening?  If you load an object
using the Control class method dearchive-xml, it should return a valid
object upon success, or a NULL (0) object on failure.

However, if you think the XML file corruption is a bug in breve, please
do send me an example so I can get it fixed.

> 3. Eof function for file object.
> I'm having trouble finding the end of files, especially if they are
> corrupted and loose my end of file marker.

I'll add this.

> 4. A garbage collection call that totally does all of the garbage 
> collection
> (I think Java, Lisp, and Squeak have this). The size of my populations 
> is
> limited by inability to garbage collect; it's actually a long story.

This is on my to do list, and, in fact, partially implemented.  Still,
it may be a while before it's ready to be enabled for everyday use.

> 5. Function that returns the type of anything, list, object, int, 
> float,
> etc.
> This would just make operations on lists of lists of things a lot 
> easier. It
> could return a string like "int" or whatever.

I'll add this as well.

Thanks for the comments!

- jon klein

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