Reduced ScriptLimits

[SirWobbyTheFirst]

Hey everyone.

I'm here today to ask, being that version 6 is probably in the planning stage, would it be possible to have the limits related to the Do command and the back, front and library stacks removed completely? Because the way I see it, those three limits serve no purpose but to cripple legit ideas for applications. The first limit related to preventing people making ripoffs of LiveCode and putting RunRev out of business I am completely for; RunRev is as much a part of my childhood as Crash Bandicoot and the PS1 is (And you better believe that's a lot), and would never want to see people claim the software as their own.

But the other three limits to me just seem unneeded, I've got a command prompt project that is handicapped by the Do statement restriction and removing that alone would bring about a whole world of scripting and us admins, we love automating stuff. Removing the front, back and library limits would allow devs to create amazing plugin systems for their applications, I alone have hit a bug with the front and back scripts when the limits have been reached, essentially the engine downright dies, no ErrorDialog message, nada, either a "Such and such.exe has stopped working" or just die to desktop and so in my APIs I've pretty much had to put in a check to try and nip the bud as much as possible.

So as a long time Rev guy, coming from the 2.0 days, could you please nerf those three limits. Again I am in no way condoning removal of the primary script limit for the sole purpose its existence puts food on the plates for RunRev workers.

Kind Regards, Mich.

PS. Do this message come across as cheesy?

[jacque]

I suspect those limits have to do with engine capabilities and memory consumption. They could probably be raised a bit without any damage but I'm pretty curious about why you'd need more front/back scripts and libraries. It's simple to combine everything into a single script, or if that isn't possible for some reason, just insert and remove them on demand. It's very quick.

[FourthWorld]

Currently the runtime engine allows 10 frontscripts, 10 backscripts, and 50 libraries. What monster of an app are you working on that needs more than 70 extensions to the message path?

[shaosean]

The scriptLimits are no longer needed as the ability to compile applications has been removed from the standalone engine.. I can easily use more than ten frontScripts in an application, but no point in using Rev and being limited..

[SirWobbyTheFirst]

Well I don't have a monster app at the moment but I like to encourage my users to develop plugins for my software and the most convenient method seems to be calling the functions in my software directly and as it stands the script limits restrictions on front, back and libraries are holding back their potential, their words not mine, but I whole heartedly agree with them. And like I said, a LiveCode based console would run rings around the likes of PowerShell in performance and be easier to use, so the Do statement restriction is also unneeded in my opinion.

I would just like to be able to put software out there without the possibility of having a person contact me and saying my software crashed after they loaded a new plugin and having nothing but a crash to desktop statement and a list of plugins which all work on my end but turn out to use those scripts a lot. I am not going to tell any people not to use the front, back and library scripts because that defeats a philosophy of programming and that is freedom to accomplish a task in anyway necessary.

Like I said, I'm not against the script limit that prevents people making knock offs of LC but I am against what can only be described as restrictions for the sake of restriction.

[FourthWorld]

Plugins are an IDE thing, and scriiptLimits don't apply to the IDE engine.

While there can be a few isolated cases where the scriptLimits may impede an app's design, in my 14 years with this engine I've not encountered one myself.

That said, even RunRev recognizes that some specialized app architectures may require going beyond the scriptLimits, and if a developer has such a need they're encouraged to contact RunRev to work out a special build that can support it.

But before we just flood RunRev with requests based around theoretical needs, it may be helpful to encourage those concerned about scriptLimits to drop in here to discuss it. There may be ways in which working within the existing limitations may actually deliver a more manageable code base, or we may discover new ways of doing things that can present a business case for expanding the scriptLimits.

[SirWobbyTheFirst]

Whilst you may seem content with them FourthWorld, I just don't see the need in the other 3 script limits, it just seems like a limit on creativity to me. I am open to others pitching in their opinions as well, additionally in my case, I actively support a plugin architecture in the standalone environment, I like to tell people, go nuts and expand the functionality of my applications if you want too, I know the IDE has no such limits. I've thought about doing a reskin of the IDE similar to what the MetaCard group are doing to give it a sort of Visual Studio or XCode look and feel but the concept blows my mind to be honest given the scale of LCs IDE as is.

Put the point is, I can't be the only one who feels this way, I don't encourage people who make the claim that the script limits should be abolished completely because I do see where RR is coming from but the other 3 just seem like a relic of paranoia to be quite honest.

I'm sorry if you don't agree with me, but this my opinion and again I'm open to others pitching in as well.

[jacque]

Put the point is, I can't be the only one who feels this way,

In the 20+ years I've been using the engine, I've only seen a single instance of someone who needed in an increase in script limits. RR built a special engine for them with a 250-line limit. I have never heard of anyone who needed an increase in libraries or front/back scripts. So yeah, you may be the only one.

I guess I don't see why the limits couldn't be increased, but it's never really been an issue. For your students, all they need to do is something like this:

insert script of <stack name> into front/back
do library stuff
remove script of <stack name> from front/back

All well-behaved plugins already do this in the IDE to prevent conflicts. There's no reason you couldn't do it in a standalone as well. However, if you really think the engine needs to abolish some of the limits, enter it as a feature request into the QCC. The worst they can say is no. But there may be a reason for those limits that we haven't thought of yet.

[SirWobbyTheFirst]

Well I tried looking for the QCC but unfortunately for me, I don't have the developer program and thus cannot use it according to the website, additionally I can't find a link to the QCC. And as for the special build, I have no idea how to go about contacting RR about that.

I am Sad Panda.

[FourthWorld]

Mick, I believe you have good reasons for asking for this, and likewise I can assure you that the team at RunRev has a long enough list of things on their to-do list that they didn't add scriptLimits just to annoy people. In fact, their current license restrictions are in some ways more liberal than RealBASIC's, and many other tools in this market like Flash and Director have no means of providing end-user scripting at this level at all.

Without knowing more about how your app is set up, how these "plugns" work, or what they're used for, it won't be possible to find ways to use the current engine effectively to do whatever it is you want to do.

As Jacque suggested, RunRev has delivered custom builds for this sort of thing in the past, so you may consider writing them to see if they can provide what you're looking for.

[SirWobbyTheFirst]

Do you know of an e-mail address of telephone number I could use to contact them? I do have a big project but I'm sort of worried about people laughing at me, considering my age and all, the sort of project is more reserved for kids who are growing up and are fascinated with how Windows, Mac and Linux work.

I told my final year project leader at Uni about it back in April thinking he'd laugh but he didn't and thought it was a great idea but I'm nervous to talk about it to be quite honest. To the fact I'm trying to cover it up now.

Working on said project would justify a reduced script limits engine in one swoop and the "plugins" statement I made but again, I daren't tell anyone for fear they might laugh at me.

[jacque]

Well, we won't laugh, I promise. But if you don't have a developer account, just write to support and they will set you up with the right contacts: support@runrev.com

[SirWobbyTheFirst]

(Deep Sigh) Okay then. (I feel like Lenny from Shark Tale explaining he's a vegetarian)

I am absolutely fascinated with how computers work, right down to the low level stuff like boot loaders and what not and whilst I have always dreamed of having my own OS like Windows, the scale of such a challenge puts me off and thus instead I got the idea to write out what can be described as an emulating operating system, essentially an OS within an OS. And I've seen this plenty of times on YouTube, people right up mini-OS' in Visual Basic and people berate them for it claiming it isn't real (Hence my fear).

Now the big difference between Rev and VB/C#/Java and most of the languages I've tried is that Rev has the ability to allow third party code to load and unload at will, stacks act as applications and can be loaded and unloaded at will by the engine, C# doesn't allow this, and in order to have things like loading and unloading DLLs in C# you have to create app domains, I asked the .NET forum guys themselves and I don't really trust .NETs memory usage plus the lack of cross platforminess.

Rev enables me to fulfill my dream, bootloader, kernel, drivers, applications the works, and the best part is that my project actually walks and talks like an OS, it has a full scale process manager with "threads", even has a customizable blue screen of death (My friend jokingly called it the Mauve Screen of Calamity) and I love working on the project. Doing what an OS does without having to learn assembler and having 3rd party applications run on it, in fact most of my comments claiming a different project we're implementing portions of the system.

Remember me asking you about tracking the object that made a call to the function, I called it Stack Manager or Stack Tracing I think and I believe Mark gave me some code that utilized the WordOffSet function, it did the trick for me to implement a GetCurrentProcessID() function, by placing it into a function called GetStackNameFromLongID() and telling the GetCurrentProcessID() function to compare the value returned against an internal array of loaded processes.

Remember my recent Window Manager question, where Jacque even stated the new version of LiveCode had graphics acceleration, yep that was for this. The graphics acceleration was one of the reasons I bought LiveCode 5.5. Nowadays, I plan on rewriting the system from scratch, getting rid of some of the programming traits I had as I was learning and swapping them for more efficient code and breaking the UI and base system into two parts is one of the reasons I asked about the script limits, explaining limits on the number of lines a user can put into the command prompt has become quite exhausting or why certain applications crash themselves because my kernel disallowed them from calling a function to insert themselves into a specific portion of the message path, or in the worse case scenario, having the system vanish in front of me/them because an app called "Insert The Script Of Me Into Back" and the back scripts we're full.

And even now, when I claim I have no monster app (Which is BS now that I've wrote this), this question is for Xenon. And yes that is the name, named after the rare gas, because I thought nobody would be as crackers as I am.

Yes I know, a couple pistons short of a V8.

[mwieder]

Wow.

I think you have redefined "ambitious".

[SirWobbyTheFirst]

Never before have I felt my heart drop so quickly to the sight of Thunderbird saying "Yoohoo, Iz Got Emailz Yo!" then when I saw the e-mail notification, as of this moment, it has developed hands and is climbing back up from my knee caps. XD