Well, that bear (you know, the deadlocks) turned out to be a formidable grizzly. Now, I don’t know about you, but me, when I see a monster like that, I turn around and run… I can assure you, there’s nothing better than a fierce predator on your tail to streamline things. First to go was .net’s WeakReference pattern. This simply couldn’t keep up with the engine (a change that touched every part of the designer: all editors, toolbox, explorer, thesaurus, timers,…). Next was the ReaderWriterLockSlim thingy (used to protect data blocks from corruption), which has a very peculiar definition of slim: you have no idea how many times I have seen my RAM blown up because of a simple integer scan. Lots of other stuff got tuned up or hacked out as well, so the expected update has arrived.
The engine appears to be stabling out, although it is still acting fishy on single core machines, where there are errors I don’t have on my multi core dev system, so I need to move to a different machine to test this out. The designer is also still very much lingering behind the engine when this is processing at full speed, but the UI should remain responsive now.
I have also included an extra demo project called ‘Scanner’. It is able to transform an input stream containing integers, representing characters, into words and numbers (ints and doubles). This doesn’t seem much, and it isn’t, except that it is doing this using a couple of flows and a general purpose algorithm (processing is still slow, mostly because the UI is trying to catch up). This was the guts of the older ‘English language definition’ demo, which I have split into 2: the scanner and the language definition, which is no longer able to do any processing (all code removed). It’s an example of a more complex flow.
The scanner demo also has the number scanning problem fixed (numbers longer than 2 came out with multiple results). This appeared to be caused by deleting a couple of neurons to many (in the scanning algorithm). I had already experienced the dangers of deleting neurons I thought were no longer used, but which were because of the splits. I will probably have to implement some sort of a garbage collection system to clean up unused neurons (but that’s for later).
Anyway, here’s the latest download (best to remove previous installation before installing this one).