Add instVar in Process

Michael Klein Mklein at nts.net
Wed Oct 6 21:51:17 UTC 1999


David N. Smith (IBM) [dnsmith at watson.ibm.com] wrote:

> The system names things too:
> 
> 	AbtEwHoverHelpBackgroundProcess
> 	CwAsyncIOProcess

And if everybody was as good about naming processes as you are, I would
be
happy, but the VA debugger is showing me about 30 unnamed processes
(they just have numbers)... hence, my work in Process.

> The debugger allows debugging of any process and seeing the name 
> helps quickly pick the process one really wants to look at.

And I suppose I'll modify the VA debugger to show the initiatorBlock if
the
processes name is just a number.

> Anyway, one usually starts off wanting to do things like they're been 
> done before, and so I was looking at adding names. I'm certainly open 
> to other solutions.

I've found that my solution, was good enough (in VW) that I no longer
even
bothered to put background processes into static variables, I would just
fork
them off into the background, and they would notify me when they were
done.
Sort of like '&' in Unix shells.

Sometimes I would even fileIn in the background, but then, again, I live
a
fast and dangerous life.  I see no reason that this shouldn't work in
Squeak,
providing that Jitter supports proper context reification (Ian?).

> BTW, how do you debug a process other than the one the debugger is 
> currently in? I often want to look at a suspended process, see what 
> it's doing, browse it's stack, and then move on with out changing 
> anything.

I got a ProcessInspector that allows one to 'debug' a *running* process.
Usually, I have a look but don't touch approach to this, i.e., it's
great
for seeing just what a background process is doing or how far through a
loop,
without stopping it!  Even better than progress bars.  I also have a
button that
interrupts the background process sort of like the break key, but for
background
processes.  Last I tried looking into squeakifying it, there were some
problems
with the Squeak debugger, but its too long to remember what.

-- Mike Klein





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