processing / processing/processing4

Detect `InvocationTargetException` when initializing global variables outside setup

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enhancement help wanted
Dominant language
Java
Stars
494
Forks
183
Avg merge
4h 39m
Merged PRs (30d)
3

Description

Created by: mglst

Current Behavior

Whilst coding I ran into RuntimeException: java.lang.reflect.InvocationTargetException. It only took a google search to find another user on the Processing Foundation Forum with the same issue, and a well explained fix: https://discourse.processing.org/t/just-starting-to-code-and-code-returns-java-lang-reflect-invocationtargetexception-error/14615/2.
There are many weird exception catching things that the Processing IDE already does to mitigate the most common of these Processing-specific oddities. The post that I link to has 2.1k, so I can safely say I'm neither the first nor last person to run into this. I find that the way Java errors are thrown is quite confusing. For instance, it complains about code at a specified line, but this refers to the 'java' file rather than the 'pde' file that I'm working on - this is not obvious and can be a source for more confusion still if I go looking for a bug at the wrong place in my code ("what even are .java files? and what do you mean I have to 'export' as application to get a glimpse at it?")

Steps to Reproduce

  1. see code from https://discourse.processing.org/t/just-starting-to-code-and-code-returns-java-lang-reflect-invocationtargetexception-error/14615

Your Environment

  • Processing version: 4.0a5
  • Operating System and OS version: macOS 12.0B5

Solutions

I would like the IDE to detect when making such errors and warn me that I'm likely doing something wrong by defining initialising global variables outside of setup - especially since this seems like something which is fine for ints, booleans, bytes, ... (as I understand, all primitives - although confusingly also Strings)
The fact that this is a RunTime error makes me believe that this might be a tricky suggestion to implement, but I'd hope that it would be a useful enough feature to be worth the cost

Contributor guide

Open the contributing guide

First steps

  1. Read the whole issue, then the project's contributing guide.
  2. Comment on the issue to say you are picking it up — it saves two people doing the same work.
  3. Fork the repository and make your change on a branch.
  4. Open a pull request that references the issue number.

Research direction

Start with the linked Processing Forum reproduction and the IDE's existing exception-handling behavior. Determine how initialization of global variables outside setup produces InvocationTargetException, then define how the IDE should detect it and present a warning that points to the user's PDE code. Done means the reported case receives a clear, Processing-specific diagnostic.

Written by the indexing model from the issue text.

Assessment

Tech stack
java
Domain
developer-experience
Issue type
Feature
Difficulty
4/5
Estimated time
3-5 days
Activity status
Stale
Clarity
Needs clarification
Newbie friendliness
35/100

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