Utilities

Code Sharing
1

All,

Picking up on the problem kirl had with Codea crashing out, has anyone put together a small library of trace routines
etc so debugging is easier? All I use is the FPS and memory displays that I posted. But I seem to remeber writing trapped data to a tab. Any other utils?

2

I normally use print statements or to comment out code. Sometimes writing to tabs or project/global data works too. How you debug code take practice, so the more buggy code you write, the better you get a debugging.

3

@dave1707 - thanks for that, I don’t think there is much more than that. I also started a list of iPad system specs so that I could recognise what system my code was running on - iPad, iPhone, iPad mini etc but never finished it. That could be a useful developer utility.

4

Here’s something that might work. Add the dBug function to your code and the first 3 lines in setup. Leave the first 2 commented for now. Then in each function you want to check, add as the first line dBug(“function name”). Each time that function is executed, it calls the dBug function and adds the function name to the start of the string str. The first 200 characters of str is then saved as global data. Function names will be added and saved until the code crashes. Then before you restart the code, uncomment the first 2 lines and run the code again. The first line will print the functions that were executed in reverse order. The second line stop() is an invalid function so the code will stop and let you see the list of functions printed. The testName function is just an example to show how to do the dBug call.

function setup()
    --print(readGlobalData("dbugData"))
    --stop()
    str=""
end

function draw()
    background(40, 40, 50)
end

function testName()
    dBug("testName")
end

function dBug(s)
    str=s.."\
"..str
    if #str>200 then
        str=string.sub(str,1,200)
    end
    saveGlobalData("dbugData",str)
end
5

@dave1707 - excellent, thanks for that, it gives some traceability which I haven’t been able to do to date. These techniques should be widely published so that anyone with a problem knows how to approach it.

6

Here’s an updated version of the dBug(s) function. Apparently string.sub doesnt care if the length of str isn’t 200 bytes to start. Therefore, the if code isn’t required. That should speed it up a little.

function dBug(s)
    str=s.."\
"..str
    str=string.sub(str,1,200)
    saveGlobalData("dbugData",str)
end