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Howto:Exposing Subsystems to Nasal: Difference between revisions
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Howto:Exposing Subsystems to Nasal (view source)
Revision as of 21:26, 8 February 2016
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Unfortunately, these two mechanisms are also rather low-level and tedious/error-prone to use correctly, so that code (Nasal callbacks) may be triggered accidently, and unnecessarily, which ultimately eats up considerable resources while creating a frame, sooner or later causing frame stuttering. | Unfortunately, these two mechanisms are also rather low-level and tedious/error-prone to use correctly, so that code (Nasal callbacks) may be triggered accidently, and unnecessarily, which ultimately eats up considerable resources while creating a frame, sooner or later causing frame stuttering. | ||
This would typically be the case when a function is invoked "too often", i.e. more often than necessary, without the programmer being aware of it - e.g. consider callbacks that are registered to be invoked multiple times: | |||
<syntaxhighlight lang="nasal"> | |||
var foo = func() { | |||
settimer(foo, 0); | |||
settimer(foo, 0); | |||
} | |||
foo(); | |||
</syntaxhighlight> | |||
While the example shown above is trivial, and straightforward to fix, the underlynig problem is a very common one in scripted FlightGear code. | |||
Equally, listeners are a constant source of trouble, because people tend to register callbacks too often (i.e. spread across multiple functions/files): | |||
<syntaxhighlight lang="nasal"> | |||
var foo = func() { | |||
} | |||
setlistener("/sim/signals/fdm-initialized", foo); | |||
setlistener("/sim/signals/fdm-initialized", foo); | |||
setlistener("/sim/signals/fdm-initialized", foo); | |||
</syntaxhighlight> | |||
What this will do, is execute the function 3 times whenever the property is modified. | |||
What needs to be kept in mind here that these are very much contrived examples, and that the code in question is often much more complex, and that such bugs may depend on certain features being in use - e.g. when using reset/re-init, many modules won't behave properly, so that redundant listeners may be registered. | |||
Even more unfortunate is the fact that FlightGear does not currently provide any mechanisms/APIs to look behind the scenes, i.e. to see how often a callback is actually executed, and where the callback is registered to be executed. | Even more unfortunate is the fact that FlightGear does not currently provide any mechanisms/APIs to look behind the scenes, i.e. to see how often a callback is actually executed, and where the callback is registered to be executed. | ||