Hollywood forums

Posted: **Sun Sep 09, 2012 9:26 am**

Hi Andreas,
I think it could be useful an improvement of the CopyTable() function to allow us to choice to make a strict copy (like it's working right now) or to make a referenced copy of the subtables.

This come useful for example to handle structures that can trigger recursive copy and make Hollywood crash.

For example I've encountered this problem during HGui and ScuiLib development and now, that I'm writing a simple sprite engine, too because my sorted sprite list reference the sprite objects and the sprites reference the sprite sorted list (to allow multiple lists), this way the sprite cloning using CopyTable() just make Hollywood crash.
I'm handling this problem manually so there is no problem for me, but I think it could be nice to have, at least you could insert a maximum recursion level to let Hollywood does not crash when this problematics are raised.

Posted: **Wed Sep 12, 2012 8:59 pm**

Hmm, do you have a small code example that makes Hollywood crash on CopyTable()? That is of course a bug and must be fixed.

Concerning the referenced copy: Hollywood never really makes real copies of tables. Internally, it all works by reference so I'm not quite sure whether I understand your problem correctly...

Posted: **Thu Sep 13, 2012 10:23 am**

Hi Andreas, here it is a simple and pointless example that shows how Hollywood crahses with CopyTable() when it find recursive/self-referencing tables. I understand that it could be a bad practice but sometimes is usefull to have this kind of referencing, anyway here is the code:

Code: Select all

Global myEngine = { a = 10, b = 20, ObjList = {} }
Global myEngineObj = { d = 20, e = 30, EngineRef = {} }


Function MyEngine:Create()
   Return(CopyTable(myEngine))
EndFunction

Function MyEngineObj:Create(engine, d, e)
   ; Create and add an item to the engine
   Local NewObj = CopyTable(myEngineObj)
   NewObj.d = d
   NewObj.e = e
   NewObj.EngineRef = Engine

   InsertItem(Engine.ObjList, NewObj)

   Return(NewObj)
EndFunction

Function MyEngineObj:Clone()
   Return(CopyTable(self))
EndFunction

; NewEngine
Local NewEngine = myEngine:Create()

Local NewObj1 = MyEngineObj:Create(NewEngine, 0, 20)
Local NewObj2 = MyEngineObj:Create(NewEngine, 0, 20)

Local Clone1 = NewObj1:Clone()

WaitLeftMouse()

As you see when I try to copy the table in the Clone() method Hollywood crashes because it goes (I presume) into an endless loop between the Engine field of the object and the ObjList of the MyEngine class that contains objects with references to the Engine itself and so on...
I've tried it under Windows

Posted: **Wed Jul 30, 2014 2:46 pm**

What happened under Windows?

Posted: **Thu Jul 31, 2014 12:29 pm**

@nicolas: Thanks for bumping this thread, I completely forgot about it.

@Allanon:
Hollywood will now no longer crash on a stack overflow in CopyTable() but exit cleanly. I've also implemented a second optional argument which allows you to tell CopyTable() to make a 'shallow' copy of the table, i.e. all subtables will only be copied by reference then, CopyTable() won't make independent copies of them. This solves the problem with copies of self-referential tables.

Posted: **Fri Aug 01, 2014 9:33 pm**

Great! Thank you!

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