Archicad crashes trying so save code with an infinite loop..

[Anonymous]

Hi everyone,

I was writing a somewhat complicated loop, reading in a file and writing 3 others, yesterday, when, upon a save, Archicad crashed (without saving the file)

A few experiments showed that commenting out a while-loop would suddenly allow a save with no hassle.

I then tried to make a new object with nothing but three lines in the master script:

WHILE 1 DO
  PRINT "Hello World!"
ENDWHILE

This had the same effect, apparently. ArchiCad locks up. I tried to monitor the ArchiCad process (on windows) while browsing for others with the same problem on my mac. The process grows in memory to about 1GB and is then flushed (probably by windows memory manager). It did like this some 5-10 times, and suddenly, responded again! The file was saved, but it took about half an hour.

Trying to open the file again, locked the whole system (no response, not even from the task manager) for about 7 minutes, and the file opened!

Now, where I come from, a save is a save, and a run is a run, and sometimes, depending on your language, you get to compile in between. But here it seems that a save is more than just a save. In other words, if your code is buggy, you can't save it!?!

I'm working on a post about this on my blog, and would like to hear your opinions about this. Have anyone had the same problem? Is this a common thing, where I just missed out on the secret info that everyone knows, so that your ArchiCad doesn't chrash while coding?

Btw, I did this both on XP and OS X with the newest patches to AC10.

If this is what it seems to be, we need to mobilize a pressure on Graphisoft to either remake the scripting/object capabilities or remake the GDL-editor completely. GDL is ArchiCad's strength over Revit, which doesn't offer scripting (I'm working on making AutoDesk offer scripting capabilities, as this is an essential feature with real BIM, and I have to use both formats). If Graphisoft does not take this serious, it could be the reason why they loose the BIM-adventure - I'll explain the reasons on my blog later on 😉

But for now, please comment on the apparent issue: Does ArchiCad crash when trying to save code with an infinite loop?

[TomWaltz]

jeppe.liisberg wrote:
Does ArchiCad crash when trying to save code with an infinite loop?

It doesn't usually crash (close). It does lock up (stop responding).

The problem is that when Archicad saves the object script, it tries to run the script once to check for errors and it gets stuck in the loop. It seems the debugger is not advanced enough to detect the loop and offer it as an error instead of actually getting stuck in it.

It's even worse since Archicad does not auto-save objects.

A lot of people have been pushing for a better GDL development environment for quite some time without much luck. I keep hoping....

[Anonymous]

when Archicad saves the object script, it tries to run the script once to check for errors

I realized this. I miss words. Somehow I'm starting to develop techniques to debug/save my objects even with these enormous limitations/bugs. But it sure ain't effective work hours.

Incredible that people are using tools like this in the year 2007. And even more incredible, that I find myself being one of these people...