Welcome!
This is the community forum for my apps Pythonista and Editorial.
For individual support questions, you can also send an email. If you have a very short question or just want to say hello — I'm @olemoritz on Twitter.
VirtualView (share code, from novice)
-
@JonB , again, thanks very much. I realise this is out of the scope of this forum. I think I am starting to get a grip on it now (we'll sort of). My idea of your summary, is you should code in a way that objects will fall out of scope when expected , and then the gc will clean up when appropriately unless you explicitly force it with a call to gc.collect, which under normally circumstances you should not need to do.
Also have to understand Phyons concept of object sharing / ref count.The del issue you point out, I think I have been having the same problem with releasing resources when it comes to ui.Views. If an action/method is set for an object in the view, the view and its resources are not being released. Maybe not 100% the same, but almost. I think under normal conditions, this would be be noticed. But for example, if you say have 10 views you want to display inside a window/view. And because of memory concerns you decide not to hide and show them, but load them and remove them. From what I can see, this will work fine. But, if any of the views say has a button that the action is defined, the view will not get unloaded. That method/function reference appears to stop the gc from releasing it. I am pretty sure I am right about this. It's just worth noting. If I am wrong, I am happy with that, but for sure, when creating thousands of views that has an object like a button with a callback method/function it will crash
-
right on, though one correction -- if you not only design things to fall out of scope but also to have no lngering strong references in other objects, then when it does fall out of scope gc does not get involved, at all! once the ref count goes to zero, memory is freed. gc gets involved to unwind circular references (figuring out that the only places an object is referenced is from other deleted objects).
In a ui application, i would think it is important to remove_subview, and if your custom class refers to other objects, set those to None when you remove your object, for instance buttons that link back to a custom class through the action attribute.
-
@JonB , I am starting to understand. But it's not self evident. A lot of gotchas. But in a normal app, you will not see the problem as the memory leaked will be minimal, but it can easily be leaked. I am really not trying to split hairs. I just think your app should not leak 1 byte of memory. It's about understanding your environment. Which, at the moment I don't, but I am trying to.
-
@JonB , oh my next idea for a VirtualCell is going to be funny. I want to make a cell that is waiting for data from a URL. Will have to do many things I guess. It's actually beyond my experience, but I will try anyway. I have some ideas, but I do not the coding experience to make it happen.
My thoughts are, to call a function to create a cell on a thread. The cell will have some built in animation/greyed out image indicating its loading. If the cell is out of the buffer ( scrolled out of range), I will have to terminate all tasks relating to gathering the data as well as releasing the resources. When and if it completes, I think I need to know that also. Also because scrolling can be fast, I think I need to have some delay before I even attempt to get the web resources. Will be just an exercise for me. But a very difficult one -
Check out my dropdown view.
https://github.com/jsbain/uicomponents/blob/master/dropdown.py
I apologize for the uncommented code... but basically, i have a thread that populates a tableview, while still allowing the user to selct or cancel before the list is fully populated. This was mainly for gitview, where I walk the entire directory structure looking for repo folders.so what you suggest is indeed possible. consider using an ui.ActivityIndicator inside the cell, as a nice way to show it is loading. IIRC, you might need to use
on_main_thread
to update things (i think that is why i used animate) -
@JonB , thanks. I have the code. I will look through it and try to understand. I will create a little test app to see if I can get the hang of how the threads are working also. I have done nothing with threading etc using the wrappers in ui. Also almost never used them in c. So it will be interesting to see what mess I can get myself into now :)
-
VirtualView with Threaded Cells
@JonB, I had a stab at creating threaded cells. What I was happy about is that I didn't need to change anything in the VirtualView class. I made a new Class called ThreadedCell. Just to seperate it. Until now, the mechanism appears to work. But I think I am supposed to use join. I haven't got my head around that yet. Anyway, it appears to behaving nicely at the moment. But I am really just guessing. I have to read a lot more. Also one big issue is I am not getting any data externally yet. I am just using time.sleep(random.random()) a few times to simulate the data fetching. When I try to start to add something like requests in there, I might get a shock :)
A different idea from your example as I am putting every cell on its own thread rather than trying to populate the table async with a single thread.
Anyway, trying....
Maybe, it's a big fail again! -
@JonB, Oh, if you pass delay = .01 to Stress, and manually scroll it while it's doing its thing, does not seem to miss a heart beat. Well at the moment
-
@JonB, I put in the ActivityIndicator as you suggested. Won't put another gist for that, but works great. One thing to note though, the documentation eludes to 3 styles of indicators. But there are many....
-
Fingers crossed this works. The repo that is.
@ccc, @JonB , ok I finally got a repo up. But, I have been changing so much. A lot not pretty, but I have been trying, also many things not completed. I think you guys will not agree with the multiple inheritance ( I just think, not sure). But, the threading and the memory/resource control seems pretty good, to me! It feels like I have done something wrong, because it seems to easy. I haven't done any locks, on_main_thread etc... However, it seems very solid to me....but, Wikipedia is not large enough for what I don't know.