Large Scripts Run too Slowly

Richard Gaskin ambassador at fourthworld.com
Tue Apr 21 11:09:01 EDT 2015


Peter M. Brigham wrote:

 > I've put gZipper into my plugins folder -- thanks, Richard! However,
 > I attempted to edit the stack -- just cosmetic stuff, the controls
 > weren't aligned and things were off-center, etc, I'm a little
 > obsessive that way, it really distracts me when stuff doesn't look
 > good. (I know this is just a quick and dirty utility, and Richard,
 > you are among the best at GUI, so no offense.)

No offense taken, but I appreciate your sensitivity.  While I try to 
balance layouts for products, the tools I make for myself are among the 
ugliest things ever conceived, with unlabelled buttons strewn about 
almost randomly and even sloppier code than what you'll find there.

That's one of the nice things about open source: I can scratch and itch 
and move on, and anyone else who wants to refine it, extend it, or turn 
it into something entirely different is free to do so.  I put in just a 
little work to get it started, someone else comes along with greater 
care to flesh it out more, and over time it may become something kinda cool.

Happy to contribute to such a process, even if as modestly as that 
ancient stack.

 > So, back to the point, I edited the positions of the controls, but
 > every time I tried to save the stack, LC crashed, leaving a
 > "corrupted" stack. When I restarted, the stack was still available
 > in the plugins list and opened fine, but if I tried to change the
 > opening mode, eg from modeless to palette, LC crashed again. The
 > trigger seems to be trying to save the stack.

Interesting.  I've seen a small handful of cases in which very old 
stacks (2.2 or earlier) have caused problems in later versions when the 
number of format changes between the two is large (three or more).

It's such a rare occurrence for me (not working on something for many 
years and then needing to update it again), and the problems I've seen 
so intermittent (these are very rare problems, and most old stuff works 
great in newer builds), that I've not been able to file a bug report.

Your note below is worth considering, but before I get to that it may be 
helpful to note that the reason the stack is modeless rather than 
palette is because I had often used it to drop files onto it from the 
Finder, and as a palette it would disappear when I switch to the Finder.

But that's a usability thing; as for the crashing:

 > I'm guessing this is probably due to my running LC 5.5.1 still,
 > but advice would be appreciated.

IIRC correctly I'd spent very little time with v5.5.1.  Back when it 
came out I had a couple projects done in v4.6.4, and stayed with that 
build for an inordinately long time, almost until 6.1.  So I managed to 
skip almost the entire v5 series.

Given the ~2500 bugs fixed between 5.5.1 and the current version, 7.0.4, 
I have to wonder if perhaps a legacy import issue may have been among them.

It may be worthwhile grabbing a copy of the Community Edition of either 
6.7.4 or 7.0.4 and see if you can reproduce that. If you can please file 
a bug report, but if not it may be that the issue was already identified 
and resolved.

-- 
  Richard Gaskin
  Fourth World Systems
  Software Design and Development for the Desktop, Mobile, and the Web
  ____________________________________________________________________
  Ambassador at FourthWorld.com                http://www.FourthWorld.com




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