Sincere Thanks for Not Wasting Resources on the GDL Environment

[James Murray]

I do a fair bit of GDL work, and I have been personally frustrated over the last few versions of Archicad that the GDL environment has become much more crashy, and of course there is no autosave, which inevitably results in lost work, often hard work, because GDL is a miserable language in the first place.

When I have complained about this in the past, I am duly patted on the head and reminded that GDL users are an absolutely insignificant minority of AC users, and there is simply no chance of any development or QA resources being spent in this area.

It has taken me a while, I’m embarrassed to admit, but I have belatedly gained wisdom about this situation. Now whenever the GDL environment crashes, I rejoice that no resources have been spent on it, and with the resulting ample attention available, the rest of Archicad should be perfect real real soon.

[DGSketcher]

I guess it depends on your programming skill set, but I quite like the immediacy of scripting / check / save / view results in AC without resorting to an external interface or knowing the dark arts of Python to import the VScode results into AC. GDL is an easy language to learn for both simple and complex objects and needs to be made readily accessible to ALL users. Param-O will never come close to what can be achieved with conditional coding.

[leceta]

sure, I'm talking from the resignation of someone who believes that an IDE enhancement will never happen. We are definitely not the first who demands such a thing...

[Peter Baksa]

Hi,

We rely heavily on LP_XMLConverter to convert HSF source format to and from GSM and LCF. Here are the tutorials we have in this theme:

http://gdl.graphisoft.com/tips-and-tricks/how-to-use-the-lp_xmlconverter-tool

http://gdl.graphisoft.com/tips-and-tricks/hsf-source-format

http://gdl.graphisoft.com/tips-and-tricks/how-to-replace-parameter-values-in-xml-format

Source code is stored in a version control system, and a diff tool is used to do code review of changes. These can be useful even for single-person development, check out if you haven't heard.

Build, localization and release is done with custom python scripts working from the source code. We have plans to publish a toolset, but I can't promise dates (expect more than a year). A small team could easily work with shell command files.

The GDL editor is inevitable when we are developing new model or doing small changes. Bigger changes involving many elements and many parameters are easier to do in HSF. We recommend using VSCode with the GDL extension as code editor.

With debugging we are very basic, the most straightforward way is using print for logging variables, sphere / circle to mark geometry, and commenting out suspicious code to quickly find which macro / command is faulty.