feature: support for `display` command
Nobody has claimed this yet.
- Dominant language
- CoffeeScript
- Stars
- 57
- Forks
- 28
- PR merge metrics
- No merged PRs in 30d
Description
Jason, Frank, and I have discussed strategies for doing this. The problem is that display must relinquish control of the Javascript thread to give the view a chance to repaint (remember, basic Javascript is single threaded; a website locks while js is running). It must then be able to resume execution as normal. For example:
repeat 50 [ ask turtles [ fd 1 display rt 30 ] ]
Jason suggested having the engine and model code run in a web worker. Then, display just sends out a message to the main thread containing the updates. The downside is that we wouldn't be able to directly call into the engine anymore, which is annoying for debugging and less convenient to embedders. There actually may be a performance hit in that web workers copy messages when sending them. Also, to get the web worker code actually running, we may have to do something weird like concatenating the engine, compat, and the compiled code.
Contributor guide
First steps
- Read the whole issue, then the project's contributing guide.
- Comment on the issue to say you are picking it up — it saves two people doing the same work.
- Fork the repository and make your change on a branch.
- Open a pull request that references the issue number.
Research direction
No files, tests, or concrete entry points are named. Start by tracing the display command through the engine and model execution, then evaluate the web-worker approach and its messaging and embedding tradeoffs. Done means display yields for repainting and resumes execution correctly in the example loop.
Written by the indexing model from the issue text.
Assessment
- Tech stack
- coffeescript, javascript
- Domain
- compilers, frontend
- Issue type
- Feature
- Difficulty
- 5/5
- Estimated time
- Over a week
- Activity status
- Stale
- Clarity
- Needs clarification
- Newbie friendliness
- 20/100